I missed posting the Wednesday Botanical yesterday (this is happening a lot lately — seriously, people, my brain is totally fried by this semester, and it’s getting worse as I limp gasping and moaning into the final weeks), so you’ll have to belatedly make do with this:
That’s an orange lit by the dim glow produced by the electrical interactions between zinc-coated nails and citric acid. It’s really dim: it took a 14 hour exposure to get that image.
Interpreting the pupfish
Hilary Rosner has an interesting piece at Wired Science on the campaign to keep the critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish from going extinct.
Background: during the Pluvial period there were a lot of occasionally interconnected lakes in the American southwest, and some of those lakes had little fish in them of what we’d later call genus Cyprinodon. Climate changed, the desert dried up, and desert Cyprinodons found themselves restricted to smaller and smaller bodies of water in the desert. Predictably, speciation occurred when populations were separated, and now five species live in the little bits of remaining fresh and not-so-fresh water in the desert.
Cyprinodon is a cosmopolitan genus, and many of its member species are doing okay, but desert Cyprinodons are having a tough time, as you might expect of freshwater fish in the desert. The Devils Hole pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolus, is facing the biggest threat of all: its only remaining natural habitat is Devils Hole with no apostrophe, a geothermal spring (92°F/33°C) in a limestone cave in Nevada, with the breeding habitat of the entire species limited to a small rock shelf just beneath the surface of the water. A century of groundwater pumping for agriculture has made that habitat even more tenuous. The fish live a year, and there’s a significant seasonal population crash each winter when less light means less algae. In September, according to Rosner, the global population of Devils Hole pupfish dropped from its usual level in the mid-100s to about 75 individuals.
There’s some question rising whether the Devils Hole pupfish is actually a “good” species, or simply a perpetually starved and overheated strain of the neighboring Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes, the Ash Meadows pupfish. (Cyprinodon nevadensis is commonly split up into six subspecies, all of them but the extinct Cyprinodon nevadensis calidae still holding on slightly better than their cousin in Devils Hole. As Rosner describes, when an Ash Meadows pupfish somehow snuck into a holding tank with some Devils Hole pupfish in it, the pupfish suddenly started breeding more successfully, and within a few generations all the fish had Ash Meadows ancestry. Predictably, a pupfish biologist has suggested that a few Ash Meadows pupfish be slipped into Devils Hole to reinvigorate the population, and just as predictably others are horrified at the idea.
A while back, two physicists, Paul Davies and Charles Lineweaver, announced their explanation for cancer with a novel theory, which is theirs, that cancers are atavisms recapitulating in a Haeckelian reverse double backflip their premetazoan ancestry. They seemed very proud of their idea.
I was aghast, as you might guess. They even claimed that human embryos go through a fish/amphibian stage with gills, webbed feet, and tails in a pattern of Haeckelian development. They do not understand evolution, development, or cancer, facts that were apparent even in the absence of their admission that they had no prior knowledge, and it was freaking embarrassing to see two smart guys with a measure of legitimate prestige in their own specialties charging off into another discipline with such crackpot notions.
Now they’ve done it again, repeating the same claims all over again. And worse, they’ve now published it in the journal Physical Biology, under the title “Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors”.
In about 20 minutes, Atheist Talk radio will be interviewing George Church, the molecular geneticist who has been working to make genetic sequencing affordable, and preparing us for the day high school students are building designer organisms in their garage. Listen to it, or be unprepared for the sneaky stuff the kids will be up to.
You know what’s spiffier than cats?
Rocks.
You know what else is spiffier than cats?
People singing about rocks.
This is a fine idea: 10000 Birds is promoting the creation of a federal wildlife conservation stamp. Instead of a stamp supporting duck hunting, how about one that favors conservation and birdwatching?
It’s painless and sensible and sends the message that we want wildlife refuges that preserve species, rather than ones that provide a reservoir of birds to shoot. There’s a petition, go sign it!
I’m feeling cynical today. I think I’ve read one too many fMRI studies. The latest faddish paper is on what the brains of freestyle rappers look like — they compared the brain activity of people reciting memorized words vs. improvising, and guess what…their brains are doing different things during those functions.
What did their brains look like?
No matter what they were rapping about, their brains "activated differently during the improvised flow versus the memorized lyrics," says Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience. When subjects were freestyling, the medial prefrontal cortex — an area associated with organizing and integrating information — showed an increase an activity. Meanwhile the dorsolateral region, which helps with "self-control, self-monitoring, and self-censoring," showed a decrease in activity, adds Pappas. (This area became more active when the rappers were reciting memorized lyrics.) Also active while the subjects freestyled were the brain areas associated with language and motor control ("no surprise given the rappers had to think of words and produce them with the muscles of the mouth and jaw"), and the amygdala, which is the brain’s center for emotional activity.
What does that mean?
"Like jazz musicians, the rappers’ brains were paying less conscious attention to what was going on but had strong action in the area that motivates action and thought," says Sarah Zielinksi at NPR. But unlike jazz musicians playing instruments, the left hemisphere of the brain — where language is processed for most right-handed people — demonstrated a dramatic increase of activity. In other words, says Jon Bardin at the Los Angeles Times, "high-level executive function is actively bypassed to allow for a more natural, spontaneous output of language" — the brain essentially turns off its own censors. There’s an "absence of attention," said Braun. "When the attention system is partially offline, you can just let things fly and let things come without critiquing, monitoring, or judging them."
You know, there’s nothing really wrong with this work: it’s not bad science. It’s just pointless science. It’s settled that we have this technology that can monitor variation in blood flow in the functioning human brain, and that’s nice, but what are people going to do with it? So far, it seems to be simply crudely phenomenological, with investigators stuffing people’s heads in cylinders and asking them to do X, Y, and Z, while we all coo over the pretty colors the computer paints on the screen.
The results of this study, for instance, are completely unsurprising…and they also don’t tell me what should be done next, other than bringing in artists in other genres and seeing what their brains do. Which wouldn’t tell me anything other than more correlations between brain blotches and behavior. I’m not seeing any new questions arising from this work, which to me is the real hallmark of interesting science.
But seriously, I hope someone develops a portable fMRI helmet, so we can take someone and strap it and a pair of waterskis on them, and jump them over a shark. And then we can do a reading of people in an episode with a Special Guest Star that ends with them waking up from a dream as the two leads get married in a very special finale.
Some of the best places in the world to see the giant Pacific octopus in its natural habitat are the coves and parks on Puget Sound (also, my natural habitat). There are lots of popular dive sites, and my idea of internet porn is watching videos taken by amateurs, like this one:
Isn’t that gorgeous?
So you can imagine local divers’ reactions when a diver was spotted rising from a West Seattle dive site holding a magnificent 80 lb. octopus and beating it to death. They were not happy. These are informally regarded as safe habitats, where everyone can view the lovely giant invertebrates, and trust that others will respect and protect the environment.
The brute, Dylan Mayer, claims that killing the octopus was an “art project” at Green River Community College, and seems to think it justifies the killing by saying he cut it up for meat…meat which he apparently gave away to other people. I think maybe his art class ought to reconsider what represents a valid contribution, if this was an official project in any way. Also, to add to Mayer’s charm, people rummaged around on his facebook page and discovered photos of him kicking animals. Another art project, perhaps?
Unfortunately, Mayer is in the clear and what he did was perfectly legal: the Washington Department of Fish and Game issues “one-day hunting licenses” — if you’re feeling a little sadistic, or “artistic”, you can apply for one of these and then visit some of the local octopus habitat and batter a cephalopod to death, no problem.
There is a petition to get Fish and Game to stop aiding and abetting the destruction of Washington’s natural resources. It would be nice of you to sign it, but don’t expect much change. I’m beginning to get the impression that many people opt for careers in wildlife biology not because they love and want to protect nature, but because they want a front-row seat for killing it.
(Wildlife biologists with integrity are welcome to disagree — I expect you’ll sign the petition first, of course.)
