All right, your ominous click-bait title worked

I clicked on 4 Black Eggs Have Surfaced From the Dark Heart of the Ocean—With Alien Creatures Inside. How could I not? Fortunately, it was a truthful title. An ROV dived 6200 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean and found strange black eggs attached to a rock, and brought some to the surface (the operators have presumably never seen a horror movie. Don’t harvest the mysterious black eggs ever, and don’t bring them back to the lab.)

“Under a stereomicroscope, I cut one of them, and a milky liquid-like thing leaked from it; after blowing the milky thing with a pipette, I found fragile white bodies in the shell and first realized that it was the cocoon of…”

It was flatworms. Platyhelminths.

Niiiice.

Not at all Lovecraftian or scary, though.

Barbarians! Barbarians everywhere!

Texas is an evil state, with some of its powerful inhabitants relishing the opportunity to slice up immigrants with razor wire. I’m less worried about the immigrants than I am the existence of Texas Republicans.

But maybe I’m being unfair to Texas. After all, South Dakota, the state uncomfortably close to me, has a governor who is entirely sympathetic to the idea of slashing brown people with razor wire and wants to send the state’s national guard and a bunch of money to help out.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Wednesday that her administration is considering boosting its support for Texas’ efforts to deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, such as sending razor wire and security personnel.

The second-term Republican governor blasted conditions at the border in a speech to a joint session of the Legislature, a gathering she requested Monday after visiting the border last week. Noem, once seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has made the border situation a focus during her tenure.

South Dakota does not have any border with any other country, unless you count the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Maybe they could worry about Canada, except they do have a buffer state of North Dakota, but Mexico is not of any concern. The only southern immigrants they’ve got are being hired by the farming citizenry who like cheap labor. But this is Kristi Noem’s focus? I kind of suspect the motivation is more racism than defending the border.

Fortunately, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has a solid response to that.

At least one person in South Dakota did not appreciate Noem’s glib demagoguery. That person was Frank Star Comes Out, which is in fact his extremely cool name and not the title of a YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with his sexuality. (We checked.)

Star Comes Out is the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and he was infuriated by the naked xenophobia and obvious cry for Donald Trump’s attention as his search for a vice presidential candidate ramps up. So he penned a letter to Noem informing her that starting immediately, she is persona non grata on his tribe’s land.

Read the letter. It’s a point-by-point response to every claim Noem has made. President Star Comes Out sees right through her: “I don’t see our Indian people and reservations used as a basis to create a bogus border crisis just to help Trump get re-elected as President and Governor Noem his running mate as Vice-President.”

Only barbarians would consider drowning immigrants to be humane…and to be a good strategy for getting votes. Unfortunately, we have lots of barbarians all up and down this country.

An arachnologist fantasizing about summer in February

I have been daydreaming about doing some collecting trips this summer — I have been seduced by the exotic opportunities of tromping around the southern part of Minnesota, place like Pipestone and maybe even making forays into South Dakota and Iowa. Yeah! Get wild with it!

And then, the American Arachnological Society announces the location of their 2024 meeting. It’s going to be in Chetumal, Mexico.

Chetumal is located in the south of the state of Quintana Roo, on the border with Belize. It’s a small town surrounded by mangrove swamps and forest, lagoons such as Bacalar, home to numerous chelicerates in addition to Mayan remains. It faces a gigantic bay that is a reserve for manatees and is located at the gateway to the Caribbean.

“home to numerous chelicerates” isn’t normal advertising copy for a travel destination, but you’ve got to know your audience. Think of the spiders you could find! Suddenly, the south of Minnesota looks tepid and boring.

I have some trepidations. I have zero confidence in airlines anymore, after that catastrophic collapse of my last trip to AAS (the meeting was in upstate NY, couldn’t even get there because airlines kept canceling flights, ended up sitting in the Minneapolis airport for a couple of days). I don’t know if I can scrape any money out of my university travel budget after that expensive debacle.

On the plus side, I do have some Patreon savings I could use — and of course I’d have to fill my Patreon page with travel photos of beautiful Chetumal. You know, the usual touristy things of closeups of spiders in the mangrove swamps. I’ve never been on the glitzy side of scientific conferences, so this might be my last chance. And it’s Mexico! I love Mexico!

So now I begin a period of indecisive agonizing, to go or not to go. I may end up looking at my budget and deciding it’s not possible, but as long as I haven’t done any accounting, I can dream.

Today is a feeding day

Every Tuesday and Friday, I hang out with the spiders and give them flies and mealworms to eat. I am a good and supportive boss. Unfortunately, the one thing I expect of them is that they produce egg sacs for me, and they haven’t been doing their job. I provide humidifiers, I maintain a strict July-like light schedule, I keep them warm, and what do they give me? Nada. Bupkis.

I’m beginning to think I might need to modify the incentives here.

Except…it would be counterproductive to do that to the females, and most of the male are already dead due to natural causes (which, for spiders, includes cannibalism). It’s a little bit frustrating.

This is not February

According to the official date, it is. This is not what February in Minnesota should look like, though.

That’s what late March might look like, or better yet, April. Fog and naked trees and patches of dirty snow are not at all appropriate for this time of year.

Have I been dislocated to Kansas?

If I were to compare anyone to a parasite, Thomas Friedman would be near the top of my list

Twenty years ago, Thomas Friedman was a standing joke for his conversations with imaginary cab drivers, his ever-retreating predictions of imminent victory in Iraq, his toxic metaphors, his faux sincerity that everyone could see right through…but he had his sinecure at the NY Times, he spent every Sunday doing the rounds of the pundit talk circuit, he was the darling of every saggy-jowled talk show host. He’s been doing this for decades without justice slapping him upside the head. For all I know (he may be writing and talking, but I’m not reading or listening) he could still be talking about achieving an honorable peace in Iraq in just six more months.

Except now he has latched onto a brand new bloody war and is cheerleading for that from the sidelines. This is all we need, more conservative assholes flatulently gassing the body politic with new poisons and new bad ideas and more demands that we treat a sociological/cultural/religious/political conflict with 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs. Here’s his new metaphor, filtered through a column by Ben Burgis, so you don’t have to give any clicks to the NY Times.

According to Science Daily, the wasp ‘injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.’

Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out.

We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.

Ugh. What the ever-loving fuck? The Times just published an opinion piece calling for the incineration of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and no one stopped to suggest that maybe comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects and calling for their fiery extermination was a bad idea? Of course not. This was the same vicious plan he had decades ago, and no one in the media seems to be able to notice how that turned out.

I have a son who, along with a lot of other soldiers, is going to be doing a tour of duty somewhere in that region (they keep the details from us) in the Spring. I’d like to hope that it is a peace-keeping mission to maintain stability there, and would rather it not become a hostile sweep to exterminate parasitic invertebrates, that is, the native population of human beings in those countries.

This is some real super-villain shit, you know

Neuralink has begun human trials, we think. The problem is that all we know about it is an announcement made by head jackass Musk on Twitter, which isn’t exactly a reputable source. That doesn’t stop Nature from commenting on it. I’m not used to seeing rumors published in that journal, and if you think about it, this is basically a condemnation of the experiment.

…there is frustration about a lack of detailed information. There has been no confirmation that the trial has begun, beyond Musk’s tweet. The main source of public information on the trial is a study brochure inviting people to participate in it. But that lacks details such as where implantations are being done and the exact outcomes that the trial will assess, says Tim Denison, a neuroengineer at the University of Oxford, UK.

The trial is not registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, an online repository curated by the US National Institutes of Health. Many universities require that researchers register a trial and its protocol in a public repository of this type before study participants are enrolled. Additionally, many medical journals make such registration a condition of publication of results, in line with ethical principles designed to protect people who volunteer for clinical trials. Neuralink, which is headquartered in Fremont, California, did not respond to Nature’s request for comment on why it has not registered the trial with the site.

So…no transparency, no summary of the goals or methods of the experiment, and no ethical oversight. All anyone knows is that Elon Musk’s team sawed open someone’s skull and stuck some wires and electronics directly into their brain, for purposes unknown, and with little hope of seeing the outcome published in a reputable journal. OK.

Besides the science shenanigans, I’m also curious to know about what kind of NDAs and agreements to never ever sue Neuralink the patients/victims had to sign. There has got to be some wild legal gyrations going on, too.

Self-assessment time!

We’ve finished the third week of classes, I need to pause and think about my eco-devo class. You know, teachers do this: a class isn’t a set of railroad tracks taking us to a destination, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to reassess.

My goals with the course are clear. We’re studying a fairly new interdisciplinary science, we’ve got a good solid textbook, I’ve got a dozen smart students, let’s explore. I explicitly want to avoid turning it into a lecture course, where I just stand up and tell them what they need to know, so I constrained myself with some serious guardrails. I only lecture once a week, on Monday, and I don’t just tell them the answers, but give them a lot of questions that they have to answer as a group on Wednesday. I also give them a primary research paper to take apart on Friday.

Does it all work? Yes, mostly.

It wrecks my weekend, though. My Monday lectures have to cover some complex material while focusing the students on relevant questions. I can’t sink comfortably into a flurry of detail, as would be easy to do, I have to bring out the broader issues while simultaneously fleshing out examples with an appropriate amount of detail. This week we’re discussing developmental plasticity, for instance, and while the textbook sings a siren song of numerous examples that I could just recite, I have to provide context and ideas and questions that will motivate discussion on Wednesdays. I think this part of the class is going OK.

I think the students are doing the actual learning part of the course on Wednesdays. This is the day I do things like put them into groups, put stuff on the whiteboards, show that they are actually engaging with the material they’re being exposed to. It’s all on the students, and these are all smart students, so I’d really have to be bad at my job to screw this part up. I prime them with a few ideas that they get at the start of the week, and then let them go.

Fridays…I’ve got to work on my Friday class. I’ve got two problems here. One is that I appoint two students to lead the discussion of a research paper, which is fine, except that these danged ambitious students charge in to do all the work. I tell them to split it up, delegate, and put the rest of the class to work figuring out what is going on in the paper, but no, they try to do it all, and then the whole class sits quietly listening along. I may have to change how I organize those days.

The second problem is me. For instance, last week the theme was about the importance of integrating multiple perspectives to answer complex question, going beyond reductionism. And then I picked what I thought was a good paper that did exactly that, trying to identify the ecological factors behind snake evolution. It was too much. It started with a phylogenetic analysis, then applied a principal component analysis to skull morphology (uh-oh, bio students don’t get much experience with PCA here), added a bit of development/heterochrony work, and then tied all of those approaches together in a nice bit of synthesis. Cool, but too much for some undergrads to handle all at once. I am challenging them, at least, but I think I’d better take next week’s paper down a notch. While my goal was to make them read primary research, maybe I’ll have to ease them in with some review papers for a while, and give their brains a chance to release some pressure.

When I say it all mostly works, that’s entirely from my perspective. Maybe the students hate it, but because they’re all polite Midwestern people, they’re too nice to say it. I’m going to have to put together some kind of student evaluation form to hand out next week so I can find out if I’ve gone off the rails.

This is where I’m at on a Saturday morning at the end of the third week of classes, and now it’s time to immerse myself in background reading and lecture prep. One source I’m finding extremely useful for this course is Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, which is a wonderfully rich source of ideas…but also would have undergraduate brains melting out their ears if I tried making this their textbook. One of my aspirations for this course is that they should be able to emerge from it at the end of the semester and be prepared to read West-Eberhard’s book without having a nervous breakdown.

That would be a fun graduate-level class to teach. Also about ten times more work than this one.