Video: True Facts about the hippopotamus

Hippos are terrifying. I feel like everyone expects elephants and rhinos to be big and intimidating, but hippos sometimes feel too big, to the point where, if you’re standing on a narrow bridge over a river, and a hippo surfaces under you, it can be genuinely disorienting, and you have to take your brain aside to explain why a whole-ass nuclear submarine just surfaced out of that brown puddle. They also make noises that are… big. They sound like a giant laughing.

I’ll admit, though, that while I’ve seen them in the wild, and even got a plaster cast of a footprint (It’s still at my parents’ place back in the US), I don’t actually know a whole lot about them. Fortunately, Ze Frank is here to educate us, and tell us more than we ever wanted to know about hippos and their poop. One of the facts I didn’t know before, was that they’re actually more closely related to dolphins and whales than to rhinos and elephants. Their common ancestor apparently decided that running around on river bottoms and grazing on land was a better deal than going full aquatic. As always, these videos are not for children or adults who don’t think like children.

Bird feeders aren’t problem-free, but they make a difference when winter comes

Our immune systems are fascinating and complex, I assume, but as with everything else in our bodies, their effectiveness depends on having adequate resources. If we don’t get enough to eat, we’re less able to fight off infection. Obviously, the same holds true for all other animals, including everyone’s favorite feathered bipeds. That means that if we want to help the local bird population thrive, we should put out bird feeders, right?

Well, not to spoil the ending, but yes, probably. There are, however, some legitimate concerns about widespread use of bird feeders. The first one is that by creating a regular, common feeding place for multiple species, you increase the spread of disease. There’s legitimate concern, especially with the current avian flu pandemic (in birds – it’s not a serious problem for humans yet), and it’s recommended that you periodically clean your bird feeders, for the sake of the birds. Nobody likes eating off dirty dishes, especially when everybody in town has been eating off those same dishes.

There’s also another problem, that I hadn’t really considered – by creating a common feeding spot, you’re also forcing inter-species social dynamics into existence, which could in turn alter the ecosystem:

According to Alex Lees, who, with his colleague Jack Shutt, published the paper in the journal Biological Conservation, the issue is that there are a few species that are now habitual feeder users – familiar garden visitors including great tits and blue tits. And they appear to be receiving a boost from feeding.

“We know from historical research that these species are increasing in number,” says Dr Lees. This could, he says, be at the expense of other “subordinate” birds.

“A blue tit is a dominant species – it tends to win in interactions and fighting for food or quarrelling for nest sites,” explains Dr Lees. “Whereas species like willow and marsh tits are subordinate. They tend to lose those in interactions.

“For willow tits, we know that one of the reasons for the decline is that 40% of their nesting attempts fail because blue tits essentially steal their nesting cavities.”

A constant supply of peanuts and seeds that boosts the number of blue tits and great tits could be helping to drive the continuing decline in the willow tit population. It could also throw off a natural, seasonal ebb and flow in species numbers, Dr Lees says.

“Migrant pied flycatchers are in direct competition with great tits for nesting sites,” he explains. “So, again, by boosting the population of great tits in the UK, we may be tipping the balance in favour of these resident species over those summer migrants.”

As Dr. Lees goes on to say, this won’t necessarily be the case in every ecosystem, because not all birds are going to clash like that. It seems like it’s primarily going to be a problem when bird feeder dynamics work to amplify an existing set of behaviors, so you’re not always going to end up with a tit-à-tit conflict like that. Still, between that and the disease risk, are bird feeders doing more harm than good?

Well, I can’t make broad statements, but based on some research from Sweden, if you live somewhere with harsh winters, then the regular food provided by feeders reduces the severity of birds’ immune response.

A small change in body temperature can be fatal for humans. Small birds, meanwhile, lower their body temperature at night by several degrees during the winter. Just like us, the birds attempt to save energy when it is cold. If they are exposed to infection, the body’s first reaction is to raise its temperature, which clashes with the bird’s simultaneous need to save energy by lowering body temperature.

“We investigated how access to food during winter affected the balancing act between maintaining a low body temperature in order to save energy, and the possibility of raising body temperature in order to fight infection,” says Hannah Watson, biologist Lund University.

The study shows that birds who were fed during the winter did not need to lower their body temperature as much at night as birds who did not have access to feeding tables. They had gathered enough energy to survive a winter night in spite of a having higher body temperature.

When the birds were exposed to a simulated infection, all the birds had essentially the same temperature during a fever. Instead of conserving energy to survive the winter, the birds without access to extra food were forced to use more energy in order to raise their body temperature high enough to battle infection.

“We had expected to find that the birds that had access to birdfeeders would have more energy to fight an infection, and that as a result they would exhibit a stronger fever response. Our results, however, show the opposite – birds that did not have access to a reliable source of food had the strongest reaction to infection. This enabled them to reach the same fever temperature as the birds with extra food,” says Hannah Watson.

Basically, a well-fed body has options, when it comes to fighting infection, that a malnourished body does not.

But if you’re like me, you may be wondering what it means to expose a bird to a “simulated infection”. While it did make me wonder about how one would convince a bird it had been exposed to a disease, and must therefor be sick, I figured I’d just go to the actual paper, since it’s freely available, and see what they actually did. Basically, they injected a substance from the cell wall of an E. coli bacteria, which caused the birds’ immune systems to react to the presence of a “disease”, without any actual risk of an infection. I doubt the birds appreciated any of their involvement in this study, but I think it’s a neat trick, and a cool way to study how immune systems work without any actual infection.

I think most people who feed birds do it because they like seeing the birds at the feeder. Growing up, my grandparents had several bird feeders right outside their dining room window, and I have fond memories of watching the birds while I ate breakfast during holiday visits. My parents also have bird feeders, and in the years they’ve been up, the diversity of birds coming by seems to have increased.

I’m not going to make recommendations about how you interact with your local bird community, but for me, at least, the knock-on effects of it are not something I’ve thought about much. All in all, I think the problems caused by bird feeders pale in comparison to what we’re doing to the planet as a whole, and how that is affecting the birds. The lesson I’m gonna close with is that if you ever see birds at your feeder during the harsh weather, and feel good knowing they’ve got something to eat, you can rest assured that your feelings are supported by science, and you really are helping them.

Video: The USA Treats Farm Workers Like Shit

I think I knew a lot of this, but it’s always infuriating to hear it all spelled out. When the US decided to end free migration back and forth across the US/Mexico border, it created a criminal class of people overnight. Migrant workers who formed the backbone of US food production suddenly found themselves completely without legal protections, and their bosses have been happy to take advantage of that ever since. Between body-breaking work at fast paces, conditions so hot that a spray of pesticide brings relief, and employers who make it pretty clear they’d use a whip if they could get away with it, it’s hard to understand why anyone would put up with all of that.

And then you remember how the US has basically been waging an irregular war against every country south of the border, purposefully destabilizing them, and creating conditions that are often even worse than the horrible conditions on USian farms.

Oh, and let’s not forget the child labor. Child labor’s having a bit of a comeback in the US. I would argue that it never really left, both because of legal loopholes allowing children to work in agriculture, and because while we moved some child jobs to other countries, there has never been a point at which children didn’t make up a significant portion of the workforce that supplies the US with its material goods. Farming is just one part of that.

As usual, John Oliver does a good job breaking down the situation, and highlighting the racism and brutality of a situation created and maintained by the US government.

Luna Moth Tails: Alluring Display, or Sophisticated Stealth Tech?

The picture shows a Luna moth on some sort of pebbled black plastic object. It's hard to tell how big the moth is, but the picture shows off its lime green wings, with orange, yellow, and white accents. The lower pair of wings have a little more brown mixed into the green, and they both end in long, twisting tails. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Simoneburton

The picture shows a Luna moth on some sort of pebbled black plastic object. It’s hard to tell how big the moth is, but the picture shows off its lime green wings, with orange, yellow, and white accents. The lower pair of wings have a little more brown mixed into the green, and they both end in long, twisting tails. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Simoneburton

I think it would be too much to say that I had a “moth phase” as a child, but I do have a few memories of being very impressed by some of the big moths I encountered in Maine, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia, Canada. I mention the latter because my family took a vacation there when I was a kid. We stayed in camping sites that were often packed with silver Airstream trailers. It was there that I first beheld the majestic Luna moth. These things can have a wingspan of up to seven inches, and while I don’t know how big the one I saw was, I was pretty small at the time, so it certainly seemed huge. For those who don’t know, Luna moths are big, bright green, and have a sort of swallowtail thing going on.

They’re quite pretty, and they barely seem like functional creatures. I haven’t really considered them much in the last couple decades, so if you asked me why they had tails like that, I’d probably guess that it had to do with mate preference and sexual selection. It turns out that they’re actually to misdirect bat echolocation, and scientists have known that for around a decade. More than that, recent research gives us some reason to believe that the tails are only for bat-scrambling, and probably provide no addition benefit or cost when it comes to reproduction or avoiding other predators.

“They have projections off the back of the hindwing that end in twisted, cupped paddles,” said Juliette Rubin, a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History and lead author of both studies. “From experimental work with bats and moths in a flight room, we’ve found that these structures seem to reflect bat sonar in such a way that bats often aim their attacks at the tails instead of the main body.”

Traits that evolve for one specific function can often be co-opted by natural selection for another, and Rubin wondered whether the twisted tails of Luna moths might come with any additional benefits or hidden costs.

Silkmoths have independently evolved tails on multiple occasions across three separate continents, and they can vary significantly in length. Hindwings in some species can extend to more than twice the size of the moth’s wingspan, and the longer the tail, the more likely a moth will successfully thwart a prowling bat.

But far from being drab, utilitarian decoys meant only for sonar-sensing bats, silkmoth tails are often visually stunning, like decorative streamers trailing behind a kite. Across the animal and plant kingdoms, many of the most colorful and alluring structures are used to attract mates or pollinators, and scientists suspected the same might be true of silkmoth tails.

This type of dual function for a single trait isn’t without precedent. The vivid colors of strawberry poison dart frogs (Oophaga pumilio) both deter predators and help males attract mates; male deer and other ungulates use their antlers to fight off rivals and signal their vigor to females; and moths that use clicks or chirruping sounds to disrupt bat echolocation can compose duets using the same sounds during courtship.

Luna moths have neither mouths to produce sound or ears to hear it, but they do have sensitive eyes and powerful scent-detecting antennae. When female Luna moths are ready to mate, they perch in one place and emit a pheromone, a single molecule of which is enough to trigger a male antenna. The males of closely related Indian moon moths (Actias selene) can find females from more than six miles away by following the pheromone plume to its source.

“We don’t know how many males are traveling to a female each night,” Rubin said. “It’s entirely possible she’s able to call in multiple suitors and potentially have her pick.”

Rubin put this idea to the test, setting up mating experiments in which a single, female Luna moth was enclosed in a flight box with two males: One with normal hind wings, and one with its tails removed.

Initially, the data seemed to suggest that females had a preference for males whose wings remained intact, but additional controlled experiments demonstrated this was more likely an artifact of the tail removal. In trials where both males had their wings clipped, and one had the tails glued back on, there was no difference in their mating success.

Personally, I think that if they did have mouths with which to scream, we might not be so cavalier about lopping bits off them, and taping them back on. I realize that moth wing tails aren’t really analogous to my own extremities, but still.

It seems as though this study had a pretty small sample size, so some salt is required, but it is interesting. They also tested whether the tails help with avoiding birds during the daytime. Many moths rely on camouflage to survive during the day, and are only really active at night, so the researchers tested whether the tails affect their ability to hide. They did this by making fake Luna moth bodies by wrapping mealworms in pastry dough, and attaching clipped and unclipped wings to them. These bait moths were then hidden in an aviary by being partially covered with leaves, and the researchers then put Carolina wrens into the enclosure to see whether the presence of moth tails affected how well the wrens found the “moths”.

The image shows a Carolina Wren standing on some sort of black grate against a white wall. The wren itself is a rich brown, with a white stripe running over its eye and back down its head, and a gray chin. it's looking to the right of the image. On either side of it, bait moths are visible, but they're partially covered by what leaves.

The image shows a Carolina Wren standing on some sort of black grate against a white wall. The wren itself is a rich brown, with a white stripe running over its eye and back down its head, and a gray chin. it’s looking to the right of the image. On either side of it, bait moths are visible, but they’re partially covered by what leaves.

I think it’s likely that the wrens can’t smell the pastry dough, so odds are decent that the makeup of the bait moth’s “body” wasn’t a huge problem (you may not know this, but moths are not, in fact, two mealworms in a pastry dough trench coat). I do wonder what exposure these particular wrens have even had to moths in their lifetimes, though, given that they live in an aviary. I also wonder whether other birds might snack on them more regularly?

This isn’t the most compelling research report I’ve ever read, but as I said at the beginning, I think it does give us at least some reason to believe that the tails really are entirely bat-focused. For most of my life, I’ve lumped them in with the elaborate plumage of various tropical birds, both in terms of function, and in terms of increased risk of predation. Apparently I’ve had it all backwards. They provide a clear benefit to survival, during the short window in which that matters, and apparently have nothing at all to do with mating.

For me, I think this is a good reminder that even when I can get a clear look at something, I’m not always seeing what I think I’m seeing. We make conclusions based on what we already know of the world, and that can, very often, lead us astray.

Also, is pastry dough OK for wrens to eat? It seems like it might not be.

 

Furious Friday: NYPD Stole Money from New Yorkers, Spent It on Robots.

At what point does a country become a police state?

I think a case can be made that the US has always been one for people with darker skin, especially with programs like Stop and Frisk in NYC, but there’s a long history of government power being used to suppress left-wing political power, sometimes pretty explicitly. It’s a policy that pairs well with the foreign policy of violently crushing attempts at left-wing governance in the so-called “Global South”, and it makes me worry about what would happen if a left-wing political movement actually got real power in the United States. Conservative wingnuts have poisoned the concept, but the “Deep State” originally referred to official and unofficial policies within the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and other parts of the US government working to suppress the left. This is not just conjecture, either. Leaving aside the obvious stuff like the McCarthy Era, the FBI ran counterintelligence operations to keep progressives out of power, and they spied on Quaker activists (among others) during the time when I was both a Quaker and an anti-war activist.

There’s also ICE, who in addition to terrorizing all sorts of people across the US, also decided to intimidate a comedian for making an edgy joke about the organization. ICE needs to be abolished.

And then, of course, there’s civil asset forfeiture. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s a policy that allows police in the United States to just take stuff from people. If you have something that they decide is “suspicious”, they can just take it. Your money, your car, your house – anything. All they have to do is say that the something in question was somehow involved in a crime (usually drug-related), and then it’s on you to prove that it’s not. They also get to keep that money. It doesn’t go to the general city budget, or the justice department or anything like that, it goes to the department where the cop who sto- sorry, “seized” your stuff works. They use it for all sorts of things, like margarita machines. If you need a refresher, to get yourself good and revved up for what this post is actually about, watch John Oliver’s video on the subject:

At what point does a country become a police state?

If it’s not when the police are literally allowed to just steal from people, how about when they use that stolen money, directly, to buy the latest technology with which to harass and surveil the victims of their theft? Cops legally take billions from people in the US every year, and the NYPD just spent $750,000 of the money they stole from New Yorkers on some fucking robots, to help them oppress and steal from New Yorkers:

Great. No way this could go wro- oh wait, it was already wrong, because they stole the money to buy this shit!

I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate how fucked up this is, and you’d better believe that if anything happens to the robots, they’ll try to charge anyone even tangentially involved with assaulting a police officer. A large portion of USian policing seems to involve around looking for excuses to harass, assault, or rob people, and there is zero question in my mind that every new toy they get will be used for those ends. It won’t be long before some poor New Yorker has their life turned upside down by a robot bought with money stolen from them.

I also don’t think it’ll be long before the cops are putting guns on their robots, given that the concept has already been pioneered. Cops are out of control in the United States, and I think it’s fair to say that in some ways, the NYPD is the most out of control, when you consider that its budget is bigger than those of the armies of many nations. And now they’re using fucking robots.

I honestly have no idea how useful these things will end up being for the cops, but this is very much just the beginning. These robots will keep getting better, because the military-industrial complex loves death robots, and wants more of them. Make no mistake – these are weapons intended to be used against the people, and they will be used in the effort to crush any movement for systemic change. One of the themes of this blog is that climate change is progressing at a frightening speed, and that our governments aren’t doing nearly enough to deal with that. There’s one flaw in that premise, though, and it’s a big one. It assumes some degree of good intent from the ruling class. It’s quite possible – even likely – that they are taking action on climate change.

They’re pouring more money into police and the military, both of which serve them and their interests. A cynical man might conclude that they’re not planning on doing anything to slow climate change or to help society adapt, but rather that they are planning to use force to keep us in line as the world falls apart, trusting climate change to kill enough of us that we won’t be able to get into their luxury bunkers. They’ll keep using human enforcers if they have to, but there’s always a risk that they’ll side with the peasantry. Robots, on the other hand, just do as they’re programmed, and don’t have any of those pesky thoughts and opinions that makes humans so unreliable. As I said, I’m not sure how dangerous the NYPD’s new toys actually are, but at minimum, they represent another step in a very dangerous direction.

It’d be a real shame if the robots somehow ended up in a body of water somewhere, you know, by accident.

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Biden Betrays Trans Students, Offers Discrimination Guide

Right at the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order protecting trans people from discrimination, including trans children involved in competitive sports. This was before the current moral panic had reached the current genocidal fever, but trans people had absolutely been under growing attack. It was a welcome sign of support from someone whose record didn’t exactly mark him as a reliable ally in the fight for civil rights. Unfortunately, Biden has apparently decided that supporting a minority that’s the active target of a genocidal hate campaign is no longer in his political interest:

The Biden Department of Education has issued new Title IX regulations permitting restrictions on transgender athletes, leaving many in the transgender community feeling betrayed. The new regulations detail numerous ways schools can ban trans athletes while remaining compliant with Title IX, alarmingly echoing right-wing talking points about scholarships and risk of injury. These regulations specify methods schools may employ to determine a student’s sex, including invasive physical examinations. Although the administration will likely try to spin it as a nuanced approach, it will likely only add fuel to the fire of schools trying to ban transgender people from sports.

Just a brief point on the issue of scholarships. It has long been noted that when it comes to trans people, and trans women in particular, it seems that “fair” is often code for “trans women musn’t win”. The obsessive belief that men are always superior in athletics, and that trans women are really men, means that to a transphobe no victory by a trans athlete can be fair. Pretty much any time you hear a story about a cis woman athlete who was “robbed” of her place on a podium, it’ll turn out that she herself had beaten the trans woman in question, or that several other cis women placed ahead of both of them. Trans women can compete, but only if they don’t win.

I think this goes for the scholarship issue as well – the starting assumption is that trans women are inherently undeserving of athletic scholarships. Some some people will pretend to be allies, but only in a very paternalistic way that assumes the trans experience will always be pitiable, When trans people don’t fit that image, that allegiance fades away. They will also side with an exploitative education system over trans rights. Biden’s record on student loan debt is not good, and I think it’s very telling that rather than pushing to create a system in which scholarships so important, he’ll lock certain people out of eligibility. There is no good reason why people should be made to compete for the ability to get an affordable education, just as there’s no reason to discriminate against trans athletes.

The new regulations emerged just hours after a substantial victory for transgender individuals in sports. Today, the Supreme Court delivered its first ruling on the recent wave of anti-trans legislation. West Virginia has tried to ban trans students from participating in sports, with a case currently being heard involving a young transgender girl in the state. Although a federal court has halted West Virginia’s trans athlete ban, the Supreme Court listened to an appeal to temporarily reinstate the ban. In a significant 7-2 decision, Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices, rejecting the appeal and marking a big moment for transgender rights.

However, the celebration for trans individuals was short-lived. Mere hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Biden’s new Title IX regulations surfaced, appearing to include significant concessions to those opposing transgender participation in sports. While the regulations may also displease conservatives by not permitting outright bans on trans athletes, they leave issues like “concerns over scholarships” and “risk of injury” unaddressed and still allow for broad bans for various sports and grade levels. The regulations outline situations in which schools could likely ban trans individuals from sports, making the new Title IX proposal document resemble a guide on how to discriminate rather than a comprehensive protection for transgender people.

[…]

Significantly, the rule does not categorically ban schools and states from enacting sports bans. In fact, the new rule allows for sports bans if they are “substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective” and “minimize harms” to trans students who are denied or banned from sports. While it does not allow for blanket bans, it still allows bans for particular sports, grade levels, and more.

This concession would be significant enough, but the rest of the document is even worse. When discussing the scope of the rule, for instance, the document states that things such as gender markers on birth certificates, invasive “medical examinations,” and medical testing or treatments would all fall under the new rule. It does not ban the use of these tools, and in fact even seems to tacitly endorse them “as long as they minimize harm.”

From what I can tell, Joe Biden has always been pretty conservative. From his opposition to busing as part of desegregation, to his work making student loan debt inescapable, to his dedication to creating and maintaining mass incarceration, he’s more or less the epitome of “well, the Republicans are even worse, so I guess I gotta vote for him”. He was, and is, a better option than Trump, but I continue to believe that he’s not capable of leading the U.S. away from fascism. There are a lot of ways in which one can oppose fascism, but appeasement, historically, has not helped. Give fascists an inch, and they’ll claim that it always belonged to them, and the mere fact that you used to have control is proof that you want to take everything from them, because you’re evil, and controlled by the Jews. Appeasing Nazis, very famously, didn’t work to do anything except help the Nazis.

I’m framing it this way, because I’m giving Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here. I’m assuming that his decision to betray trans people, while they are actively trying to defend themselves against a genocide, was made out of political calculation rather than personal bigotry. The best-case scenario is that he thinks that this will demonstrate that he’s willing to “be the reasonable one” and meet the Republicans halfway. If that’s what’s going on, then Biden is once again demonstrating that he has learned nothing from the last three decades of GOP politics.

“Meet me in the middle,” says the unjust man.

I don’t think this will work, because the fascists have no interest in anything less than the eradication of trans people from public life. What seems more likely, to me, is that the fascists will use this as proof that “the left” secretly knows they’re right about trans people. This will embolden them, because fascists cannot be appeased. They read appeasement as weakness, and they view weakness as an invitation to attack.

As Erin says elsewhere in the article quoted above, these new regulations ignore the lies that are often told about trans athletes. I think one of the reasons why this is such a popular line of attack is that most people don’t really understand how sports came to be segregated by gender, or how transition affects athletic ability. If you like videos, Mia Mulder and Jessie Gender both tackled the subject. Cosmos Magazine also dug into the issue just over a year ago:

While research in this field is still in its infancy, it’s clearer than some think. Not only do trans women not have advantages over cis women in sport in most cases, but cis women playing sports are overwhelmingly not worried about trans women competing alongside them.

First, let’s start with the science. When a trans woman decides to transition, usually one of the first medical steps they’ll undertake is to go on hormones. These are testosterone blockers (also known as anti-androgen medications) and estrogen, both of which are common medications that can also be prescribed to cis women to treat various ailments.

These hormones have a number of effects on a trans woman’s body – they add and change the way fat is distributed, they lower the levels of red blood cells, and significantly decrease strength, muscle and lean body mass.

“In sports cheating via ‘blood doping’, red blood cells are raised,” wrote Ada Cheung, an endocrinologist from the University of Melbourne, in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion article. “The opposite occurs in trans women: oxygen-carrying red blood cells drop to female levels. Trans women gain fat mass and lose bone density.

“Further research is coming. My research group at the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University, have started the GAME research study examining how feminising hormones impact fitness, endurance, physique and gene changes in muscle over time in comparison groups.”

Although hormones will change many facets of a trans woman’s body if they transition as an adult, it won’t change someone’s height; and one study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggested that despite strength and muscle decreasing, they may still have a small advantage over the average cis women.

This is where the controversy comes from. Is it “fair” for someone who went through male puberty to be able to play at the elite level with women? Despite the recent coverage, this is not a particularly new issue. In elite sports, many sporting bodies already have codes in place that allow trans women to play if their testosterone level is below 5–10 nanomoles per litre for a number of months.

But in almost all sports, height or a slight strength advantage are not what gives you the leg-up over competitors. The AFL has called the ideas that trans women will “dominate” on the field, or cause a safety concern to their cis teammates, as “myths”.

“Sporting ability is more than just hormones,” they write in their Gender Diversity Policy. “Like other players, gender diverse players are all individuals and may have a range of physical abilities, fitness, skill levels and different strengths and weaknesses in the multi-skilled game of Australian football.

“For example, a cisgender or transgender woman may be taller and/or stronger than other women competitors but may also be slower and/or less agile.”

The results at the Olympics and other major sporting events back this up. For the very few trans women who have competed in sport at the elite level, there’s been no domination over cis women. Trans women may occasionally win, but they have never broken a world record, or won an Olympic event. If anything, trans women seem very much on an even playing field with their cis counterparts.

It’s also worth pointing out that the cohort of trans girls who transitioned before going through male puberty is only going to increase as more transgender people are able to transition earlier. For example, in 2017 in Australia, a law was overturned in the courts that had required all under 18 trans youth to go to court to be able to access puberty blockers or hormones from their doctor. Although there’s still a long way to go, increased access to gender affirming care for kids means that the issue itself is very likely to get smaller over time.

But, of course, the transphobes are doing everything they can to prevent that last paragraph from being true. They’re fighting to make it impossible for anyone to transition, and they’re starting with children. They don’t want fairness, and they don’t care about the wellbeing of trans people; they just want them to stop existing. They also, as I said, neither know nor care why women’s sports are separated from men’s sports:

This idea that trans women are naturally better at sport than cis women comes back to the impression that men have an innate advantage over women in every sport, which is not true either. Although we’ve mentioned that men are on average taller and stronger than women, at very long distances in ultra-running, research has shown that women start to outcompete men. This seems to be because women are metabolically better suited for endurance. Then there’s sports like figure skating, which became segregated in 1905 after British woman Madge Syers entered what had previously been an all-male World Championships and won silver.

Cis men do have an advantage in some areas, but not in others. I’m sure there are people who believe that men have a “biological advantage” when it comes to marksmanship, for example, but I would hope that none of my regular readers think that. One big reason many competitions are segregated like this, other than protecting men’s egos, is that due to the way history has played out, there are fewer women who go into professional athletics. Having a smaller pool from which to draw talent means that you will have fewer people capable of performing at the very peak. There are other reasons, which are covered by the videos I linked above, but the reality is that the whole situation is a lot more complicated than just “man stronk, woman weak”.

And when it comes to student sports, as the Cosmos article mentions, the point is rarely just to see who’s best. This may come as a shock to some members of the sport-poisoned society of the United States, but when it comes to children, sports don’t exist to train kids for professional leagues. Most of the time, it’s far more about practicing teamwork, getting exercise, building self-confidence, and things like that. If losing a sporting event, as a student, means that you can’t afford to live, or to keep getting your education, something in society has gone very, very wrong.

I don’t know whether this move by the Biden Administration will have whatever political benefits he’s hoping for. As some of the people I follow on Twitter have mentioned, trans people are both a tiny minority, and generally not very popular in USian politics. It’s possible that this will swing some voters in Biden’s favor, and this kind of casual discrimination is better than the wholesale extermination that the GOP is pursuing. Even so, it won’t slake the conservative thirst for blood. You can argue until the cows come home about how this is some sort of cunning ploy, but at the end of the day, it’s still a betrayal. This will directly harm student athletes of all ages, and it will encourage the bigots to redouble their efforts to hurt all trans people. This feels like the trans community is being used as a political pawn by someone who truly does not care of that pawn ends up being sacrificed.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

A glimmer of hope for a critically endangered wildcat

Scottish wildcats are a nearly-extinct species of cat that looks similar to, and can interbreed with, house cats. Specifically, they look like thick-furred tabbies. They also seem to inspire some rather dramatic language, being called “highland tigers”, or, in the case of this video, the last king of Scotland:

To be fair, I did name my cat His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat, so I guess I’m not one to talk. By now I’m sure you’re aware that if you have a pet cat, you should probably keep it indoors. It does mean you’ll probably have to put more effort into entertaining it, but it really would be for the best, for the ecosystem around you. With climate change, pollution, and feral cats, I think it’s probably for the best if we do what we can to take a little pressure off.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind about housecats is that they do not operate like a normal member of an ecosystem. Humans actively maintain their presence, while protecting them from diseases, and giving them safe shelter from predators and from the elements. Feral cats are more vulnerable, of course, but they don’t exist in isolation from fully domestic cats. There’s interbreeding, if pet owners don’t spay or neuter their pets, there are pets that get lost or abandoned, and become feral. Human activity, absent a real effort to the contrary, tends to support and maintain feral cat populations, in addition to maintaining a population of unnaturally healthy pet cats that also kill local wildlife.

Sunlight seems to make this Scottish Wildcat's tabby fur glow golden. Its hazel eyes pop thanks to black-rimmed lids that look like it has eyeliner. its lips and chin are white, and there's white fur on its throat. The rest of its body, out of focus in the background, looks like gray and black stripes. Further back, you can see vegetation, very out of focus. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Airwolfhound

Sunlight seems to make this Scottish Wildcat’s tabby fur glow golden. Its hazel eyes pop thanks to black-rimmed lids that look like it has eyeliner. its lips and chin are white, and there’s white fur on its throat. The rest of its body, out of focus in the background, looks like gray and black stripes. Further back, you can see vegetation, very out of focus. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Airwolfhound.

These concerns are generally raised because of the harm done by feral and pet cats to bird and rodent populations, but when you add in a creature like the Scottish wildcat, interbreeding becomes a huge problem. There are simply more house cats than wildcats, and because they can interbreed, the house cat population will absorb the handful of remaining feral cats in much the same way that Homo sapiens absorbed the dwindling Neanderthal population, if left unchecked. Biologists will be able to point to DNA markers of distant wildcat ancestry in the feral cat population, but wildcats, as a species, will no longer exist.

When it comes to the question of whether there are any “pure” wildcats left, I think that the answer lies not just in genetic analysis, but also in behavior, and the role they play in the ecosystem. As the video below mentions, feral housecats behave very differently from wildcats. Where wildcats are solitary outside of breeding season, and maintain a low level of density, feral housecats form colonies, generally supported by a mix of wild prey and well-meaning but misguided humans who feed them. That social behavior harbors diseases, which can then be passed on to the wildcat population.

The feral cats are a problem for the wildcats, but if feral cats were to fully replace the wildcats, it would be worse for the ecosystem. In addition to maintaining low population density, wildcats do often go for larger prey than housecats, sometimes even taking fauns, which is probably which they’ve historically made farmers nervous. Referring again to the video below, having a mid-sized predator around changes the behavior of prey species, which in turn changes the impact that they have on the rest of the ecosystem. It seems odd to call a little creature like this an “apex predator”, but in the highlands as they exist, the title seems to fit.

There are three angles on conservation focused on predators like wolves or wildcats. One is the social aspect – they’re charismatic. These cats are extremely cute, and so it’s easy to get people to care about them. The second is that if you have a healthy, stable population of medium or large carnivores, that means that the entire ecosystem that’s feeding them is also healthy. It means that the various prey species are also getting enough to eat, and aren’t themselves being eaten to extinction. The third is the one I mentioned in the paragraph above, and I think it’s one that people are less likely to think of, so I’m glad it was brought up.

I find it encouraging that in this documentary that was put on Youtube 6 years ago, the expert estimated that the Scottish Wildcat had maybe 5-6 years left. That means that their efforts to preserve the species have actually been successful, so far, and while they’re not in the clear yet, they seem to have a real shot. That’s good news, both for the cats, and for our ability to deliberately reduce the harm that we’re doing to local ecosystems. The expert most cited in that video, Paul Donahue, has a point, in worrying that with only three or four dozen wildcats actually in the wild, capturing them for a breeding program would hurt more than it helps. I honestly don’t know whether that’s the case, but it seems as though the projected release of 20 cats per year would quickly make up for that loss. It’s also not clear to me whether they captured any new cats for the program, whether all the cats used were already being held in zoos. It seems to be the latter.

I was initially going to talk about the practice of “headstarting” turtles – raising them in captivity till they’re past the point at which hatchlings experience the highest mortality, to give them a better shot at surviving to adulthood than they would otherwise have. This program is similar to that, but a better comparison might be what happened with the black footed ferret in the midwestern United States. The short version is that they went from numbering in the tens of thousands to having just 18 individuals left in the entire world. There was a captive breeding program, an associated habitat conservation effort, and now there are several hundred of them in the wild.

The ferrets faced a different set of threats from the Scottish wildcat, and weasels are obviously not cats, but I think that the comparison is worth making. When it comes to conservation, I’m generally an “all of the above” sort of guy. I think we should do as much as we can both to help ecosystems recover from the harm we’ve been doing to them, while also reshaping our society to be more steady-state, and more a part of those ecosystems. As I said, I understand Donahue’s concern about taking cats from the wild for captive breeding, but that effort does seem to be progressing. The association Saving Wildcats has gotten approval to begin releasing captive-bred wildcats into Cairngorms National Park in northeast Scotland, starting in June. This is sort of a trial period, during which they’ll be releasing small numbers, tracking them with GPS collars, and seeing how they do:

The first in a series of trial releases at undisclosed locations in the National Park is planned for June. The Saving Wildcats project said it would be the first conservation translocation of wildcats in Britain. Eventually, as many as 20 wildcats could be released annually.

Scotland’s nature agency, NatureScot, approved the licence for this summer’s release. It assessed Saving Wildcats’ application in line with the Scottish Code for Conservation Translocations. The process considers a range of issues including animal welfare, site suitability and potential impacts on neighbouring and community interests.

Saving Wildcats, which involves a number of organisations, has been breeding the animals at Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, near Aviemore. The wildcats are to be released in a 600 sq km area involved in a landscape conservation project called Cairngorms Connect.

It is a partnership of neighbouring land managers – Wildland Limited, Forestry and Land Scotland, RSPB Scotland and NatureScot – working towards a 200-year vision to enhance habitat, species and ecological processes.

NatureScot’s head of biodiversity, Dr Katherine Leys, said Saving Wildcats offered a lifeline for the species. “This journey is not without difficulty, and we know that there are more hurdles to overcome before we reach the point where we are ready to release the Wildcats into carefully selected areas of the Cairngorms National Park.

“Once there, the Wildcats will face further challenges, so it’s crucial the project continues to work with local communities, farmers, land-owners and cat owners to ensure wildcats are given the best chance to survive and thrive.”

Saving Wildcats project lead and Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s head of conservation, Dr Helen Senn, added: “When the time comes, we will be able to move Wildcats under licence from pre-release enclosures at Highland Wildlife Park to carefully selected areas in the Cairngorms Connect landscape which provide a suitable mix of habitats and potential prey for the species.

“After release, the Wildcats will be monitored using GPS collars as they face the many challenges of life in the wild. The fight to restore Scotland’s Wildcat populations is just beginning and we are grateful to everyone providing expertise and support along the way.”

Apparently the National Farmers Union of Scotland is also on board, which is good, because farmers concerned about livestock were part of why wildcats have come so close to extinction.

As they say, there’s a ways to go yet before they’re at the hoped-for 20 cats rewilded per year. Even so, this is a big step in the right direction. I mentioned the division among activists on this issue, between focusing on providing the right conditions for the wildcat population to recover on its own, and doing the captive breeding that led me to write this post. Part of the reason I like “all of the above” approaches, where they are possible, is that the work that has been done to control feral cat populations, and to get landowners on board with preserving habitat, and helping keep track of the wild population – all of that work will absolutely increase the likelihood that the captive breeding program will succeed.

I don’t know the extent to which those efforts have been active around Cairngorms, but I believe work like that has been ongoing across Great Britain. The future is still very uncertain for the “highland tiger”, but from where I’m sitting, there’s more than a glimmer of hope.

The image shows three wildcats on a patch of grass. It looks to be a mother and two teenage kittens. Their fur is a light brown-gray with vertical black stripes, forming black bands on the tail, and a black tailtip. The mother cat is walking toward the left of the image, looking at something off-camera, and one of the teenagers is walking pressed against her side, with its tail straight up in the air. The other kitten is sitting, back in a neat curve, looking at whatever the other two are approaching. The sitting kitten looks like he's about to get up and follow the others. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Peter Trimming.

The image shows three wildcats on a patch of grass. It looks to be a mother and two teenage kittens. Their fur is a light brown-gray with vertical black stripes, forming black bands on the tail, and a black tailtip. The mother cat is walking toward the left of the image, looking at something off-camera, and one of the teenagers is walking pressed against her side, with its tail straight up in the air. The other kitten is sitting, back in a neat curve, looking at whatever the other two are approaching. The sitting kitten looks like he’s about to get up and follow the others. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Peter Trimming.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Historic Welsh Village Becomes Investment Opportunity, Residents Become Collateral Damage

Housing prices have been skyrocketing all over the so-called “developed world”, and while various other excuses have been made, the primary problem seems to be rentier capitalism – buying something that other people need, for the sole purpose of denying access to anyone who doesn’t pay. I don’t think there’s much question that we could stand to build more housing, especially in some areas, but owning other people’s homes as a profit-generating investment is, by default, going to increase the cost of housing. Not only do landlords have an incentive to keep raising rents, they also have an incentive to keep buying up more homes, driving up the prices, and moving home ownership ever farther out of the reach of people who work for a living.

And on the subject of work, collecting rent is what’s known as “passive income” – you are paid for doing no work at all, simply because you control access to a necessity, because the government will enforce your claim. Some landlords will also do things like maintenance work, but most hire others to do that, using the money given to them by their tenants. Landlords do not work for the money tenants give them. This is an inherently exploitative business model, and yet another aspect of capitalism that can only exist because the government participates on behalf of the landlord. Absent that power, the landlord would need to take care of their own enforcement, and at that point we’re basically back to feudalism.

When we talk about corporate home ownership, and rising rents, I tend to think about cities, where a single entity can own whole blocks of flats, or one rich asshole can own dozens of multi-family houses, but the reality is that this is happening everywhere, and it seems unlikely that it will stop until nobody owns their own home anymore. Case in point, a Welsh village built in the 1500s, to house workers in a slate quarry.

Sixteen homes in a historic Welsh hamlet built for workers at a 16th century slate mine are up for grabs for £1million after the asking price was slashed by £250,000.

Estate agents have been looking to sell the historic slate mining village of Aberllefenni since 2016, but uncertainty over Brexit meant a deal has never materialised.

Having originally put it up for sale for £1.5million, the asking price dropped to £1.25million in November 2019, only to lower it once more in the hope of securing deal.

Estate agent Dafydd Hardy previously said it would be ‘an excellent investment opportunity.’

Work in the nearby slate quarries apparently stopped in 2003, and it seems like the people who live there have never actually owned their homes. There’s no question that the people whose homes this places in danger have done nothing to deserve having their lives turned upside down for someone’s “excellent investment opportunity”, but under capitalism, poverty itself is deemed worthy of punishment. If you get steamrolled by some corporation or an individual rich asshole, that’s your fault for not being rich enough to defend yourself. And yes, in case you were wondering, we have heard from one of the people affected, whose rent has been raised since the village was bought:

Sara Lewis, 55, who has a lung disease, has to use her oxygen bottle on the bench at Aberllefenni, Gwynedd.

Her rent has increased from £435 to £550 after her new landlord bought the property and 15 others in the village.

Walsh Investment Properties said the original rental amount – under a previous landlord – was “not sustainable”.

“My home is my haven,” said Ms Lewis, who has lived in the property, Glanyrafon, for 22 years.

“The furthest I’m going is the bench. If I belong anywhere, it’s Glanyrafon.

Ms Lewis receives £300 as part of her Universal Credit payment towards her monthly rent, and has recently heard that Gwynedd council will provide £100 of discretionary funding, which leaves her to find an extra £150 each month.

“I’m protesting about the [UK] government to begin with for this standard £300 a month rent, which is ridiculous, and against Gwynedd council.

“It’s so stressful. It’s just a horrible situation to be in.”

Ms Lewis, who cannot work because of her emphysema, has spent six hours each day sitting on the bench between last Monday and Friday.

She said that being out in the wind and the rain is affecting her health but she is prepared to continue next week.Walsh Investment Properties director Chris Walsh has previously said that most of the properties had been paying “a low rent for a number of years”, adding that was “not sustainable in the current economy [and] we feel it is fair and reasonable to charge a market rent”.

Fair and reasonable, because profit for the rich is more important than life for the poor.

Oh, did I say earlier that she’d done nothing wrong? I’m so sorry I lied to you about that – she committed the absolutely heinous act of being unable to work due to illness. This, of course, means that she must be turned out of her home, because only people who WORK deserve to live with dignity. You know, like the millionaire couple who bought her home and raised the rent:

Now, a report by the Daily Mail has depicted the lifestyle of the Chris and Lisa Walsh.

It claims that they enjoy a lavish life of travelling across the world, including Mrs Walsh posing for photos outside the five-star Bellagio in Las Vegas in 2019 and her Facebook cover photo backdrop being a stunning view of the Greek island of Santorini, reports NorthWalesLive.

Now, one should not trust the Daily Mail, in general, and maybe this is my bias speaking, but I’m inclined to believe them. Like I said at the top, being a landlord does not involve actual work, It’s just a way to profit off of the fact that an awful lot of us can’t afford to own our own homes, but if we don’t get shelter, we’ll probably die from exposure. To me, this story highlights the lie that anyone can get ahead under capitalism. The village was built, apparently as a sort of company town, in the 1500s, and its most recent owner was a slate company that was established in 1861. It seems unlikely that the people living in that village ever had a real opportunity to build wealth from their own labor, or own their homes. The jobs “created” by the wealthy only ever really benefit the wealthy, or those jobs wouldn’t exist. This is what it looks like when everything is built around money and those who hold the most of it- nobody has a right to live in dignity and security, unless they’re rich enough to profit off the labor and suffering of others.

If you want to help me pay rent, you can do so by signing up at patreon.com/oceanoxia.  There aren’t currently a lot of benefits, beyond the feeling of joy that comes from giving me your money, but I’m working to change that, and if you can spare a dollar or two per month, you can even influence that process! How exciting!

Video: Life Atop a Glacier

The main reason that I’m convinced that life exists on other planets, is the sheer variety of environments on Earth that shelter life, seemingly against all odds. From the scalding waters of the sharkcano, to lakes entombed in ice, to the corrosive slim of Villa Luz, life finds a way. Today’s edition is similar to the Antarctic lake, but it’s further upstream, on the glaciers that feed such lakes, or that feed into the oceans. Unlike Lake Untersee, these communities are on the surface of the ice, which means a surprisingly diverse community for little puddles in glacial ice:

Videos: Lichens have a bit more going on than we used to think

I caught the head cold Tegan was dealing with last week, so my brain feels like it’s all clogged up with snot. Lichens are a group of sybmiotic organisms (the term “symbiosis” was invented specifically for lichens) formed by a mutually beneficial relationship between fungi and algae. The historic understanding was that each kind of lichen had one of each, with the fungus forming the main structure, while the algae provide the “food” through photosynthesis. Hearing it described, it sounds a lot like the deal that coral polyps have with algae in the ocean.

The twist is that a few years ago, some folks apparently realized that there were “different” kinds of lichen that seemed to have the exact same species of algae and fungus, so what was going on? Well, it turns out there was a third partner in the relationship, at least in some lichens – a yeast. I decided to include two videos, because they’re both short, and describe things in slightly different ways. On that note, I’m going to go inhale steam from a mug of mint tea and see if that makes my sinuses feel better.