Holy Shit, Jellyfish!

I mean...look at that thing. What? Whose idea was it to make a living creature of the oceans of this Earth look like that? Why would you do that, nature? What's the deal? What happened here? Just for a start: depending on the species, jellyfish bodies are between 95 and 98% water. Plain old water, plus two percent fleshy, translucent membrane.

They have no brains. No specialized digestive system. No blood. No nervous system. No vascular system. Just a one-size-fits-all cavity where food meanders its way in and is passively digested. The gastrovascular cavity is basically a hipster nonchalantly swaying to the music at a Death Cab for Cutie show, because they're not as hip and unknown as they used to be and it doesn't want to look too enthusiastic.

"Yeah, Ben Gibbard is alright, I guess," he said, tears glistening on his cheeks as "Transatlanticism" reached its climax

The only thing jellyfish can consciously do (if you can even call it consciously, which you probably can't) is flex a single muscle that kind of, sort of, in a way, gives them control over their motion. Like spreading your arms and legs out to slightly alter your heading while you're falling from 20,000 feet without a parachute.

The way they reproduce is weird as hell, too. A bunch of them get together and basically make a big old cocktail of sperm and eggs, which eventually leads to mass fertilization. The eggs hatch into little larvae called planulae, which stick to a firm surface and grow into polyps. Polyps are essentially what you'd expect to get if you cross-bred a jellyfish with a sea anemone, and if there are any mad scientists reading this and thinking that sounds like a good idea, please don't. You are the most boring mad scientist in history. Stop it.

If this diagram shows up in your plot to take over the world, there are several somethings wrong with you.

So the polyp grows up a bit, and suddenly things take a turn. In many cases, the polyp will spontaneously just...clone itself. Because jellyfish are both sexually and asexually reproductive organisms. And then sometimes, just for kicks, a few polyps will decide they're not in a place right now where they can afford to live on their own, so they'll find some roommates and form a colony. Not to save on rent money, mind you. They share a goddamn stomach. Because of course they do.

Finally, they fly the coop to become an ephyra, which is more like what you imagine when you think of a jellyfish. Then it grows tentacles, and becomes a medusa. Then it haunts your nightmares and inspires Nintendo to design a creature that can literally suck your life force out of your upper torso.

If you played games in the '80s and '90s, you are now having PTSD-esque flashbacks.

Holy shit.

"Ben Gibbard 2" by Sharat Ganapati - originally posted to Flickr as Ben Gibbard. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ben_Gibbard_2.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Ben_Gibbard_2.jpg

Holy Shit, Giraffes!

I'm gonna make this a short one since it's bed time as I write this and I am currently treating sleep as a precious commodity. That guy up there, as you are no doubt aware, is a giraffe.

I could tell you about how endangered they are. I could tell you about how they gestate for 15 months before being born at about six feet tall. But those facts would just be interesting. Not holy shit interesting.

So I'm gonna tell you how gay they are.

Very.

Giraffes are very, literally gay. Somewhere between 30 and 75% of what scientists coquettishly refer to as "mounting incidents" occur between two male giraffes. It usually happens after "necking," which in this case is a bit more violent than the traditional human definition of "making out."

I guess that makes this foreplay, though.

Two males will hilariously slap their necks against each other until one of them cries uncle. Then they cuddle and caress each other for a bit, which eventually culminates in the stronger male hopping up, mounting, and boinking the one he just out-necked.

And again: this is a more frequent occurrence than mating in the world giraffe community.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Poison Ivy!

This weekend, I was mowing the lawn when I spotted a bushel of trifoliate weeds. Remembering the old adage, "Leaves of three, let it be (unless it's under your backyard tree)," I sprang into action. With gloved hands, I yanked the whole damn thing out of the ground, roots and all. Then I put it into a plastic bag and tossed it into the trash.

Alas, one of the leaflets brushed against my hand, spreading the urushiol onto the bare skin there. Then I wiped the sweat from my brow with the same spot on my arm. Now my arm has an infuriatingly itchy rash, my eyes are swollen and bumpy, my heart is a pit of black rage, and every fiber of my being is screaming in hatred of Toxicodendron radicans, more commonly known as poison ivy.

Or "Satan's Salad"

So we're going to talk about this little son-of-a-bitch weed. First and foremost, how it works. Poison ivy is one of many plants that produces urushiol, an oily substance that 85% of human immune systems treat like Genghis freaking Khan. If you're allergic, like most people are, your body will throw everything it has at the urushiol, and that's why I hate botanical world right now.

Once your dumbass pores absorb the oil (probably because you took a hot shower, which opens them), you are very unlikely to be contagious. The blisters are full of water and pus, but not poison ivy juice. Any clothing you have that came into contact with it, on the other hand, is highly contagious and should be washed as soon as possible. Or burned in a cathartic bonfire. Or nuked from orbit. Your choice, really.

From there, depending on the severity, you either wait it out, take some antihistamines, apply some itch cream, or take steroids to unleash the hidden powers of your manly immune system or something (citation needed). I'm on the steroids route.

Artist's rendition

Now here's the weird stuff. You knew it was coming. First of all, humans are the only animal we know of that is allergic to poison ivy. Even chimps, who share a ludicrous amount of DNA with us, are completely immune.

In fact, one of the preferred (or at least entertaining) methods of getting rid of an infestation is your yard is to hire a goat. They love the stuff. They'll eat it all up for you without getting so much as a stomachache.

I knew there was a reason I don't trust them. I could see it in their eldritch eyes.

The other big weird point: urushiol is not restricted to poison ivy. Of course, most people know that poison oak and poison sumac work the same way. That's true enough. There's also a tree found in Asia called the Asian lacquer tree that has it. The Japanese call it the urushi. I respect you enough as a reader to assume you can make that connection. That's not too weird, though, is it? You were expecting more.

I guess I'll have to throw in some mangoes.

I'm generous like that

Mango leaves and stems (and possibly also skins) have the same allergenic compound as poison ivy, and are, in fact, the number one cause of plant-based rashes in places where mangoes are cultivated, like Hawaii.

The moral of this story is fuck mangoes, fuck urushiol, and most of all, fuck poison ivy.

So holy shit, or whatever. I'm gonna go take some more Benadryl.

Holy Wombat Shit!

I'm going to make this exceptionally brief, for brevity is the soul of not-feeling-like-taking-the-effort-to-write-out-a-whole-blog-post-right-this-secondness. This is a wombat.

Yes you are, you cute little marsupial!

Yes. He is the cutest little doofus you can imagine. Now, here's his poo:

The logical next step.

It's square. It is a square poo. Wombats poop squares.

Why? Because the distinct shape helps to mark their territory, like a building block.

And it helps them identify potential mates, like that video you found in your uncle's special box when your parents weren't looking.

So, to recap: Wombats are adorable, but they're into square scat porn.

Holy cubic Shit.

Holy Shit, the Ship of Theseus!

Many rhetorical questions do little to excite my imagination. When someone asks me what the sound of one-handed clapping is, I show them. It makes a sound. That's silly. When I'm asked whether a tree falling in the woods without anyone around to hear it make a noise, the answer is perfectly obvious to me. It's not space. There's oxygen. So yes, of course it does. That's a rather self-centered question to ask, Mr. Pretentious Philosophy Major.

I know that I'm not really addressing the point of the questions, but they just don't make me stop and think as much as they're supposed to. Not when there's actually a fairly logical answer. But there is one hypothetical that always gets into my head and crosses a few wires. They call it the Ship of Theseus.

Here's how the scenario goes according to Plutarch, who is the earliest source we have of the issue:

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same."

He had a way with words. Not a way to make them interesting, just...a way.

In simpler terms, and in the form of a question (since I established the implicit promise of a question back in the first paragraph): If you repair a ship by replacing rotted timbers little by little, at which point (if any) can you say it is no longer the same ship? Thomas Hobbes sweetened the pot a few centuries later by adding this sub-question: If you make a new ship with the remnants of the wood as you make the repairs, which ship (if either) could truly be called the original?

I believe the technical term for the result of thinking about this question is "a mindfuck." You may already be seeing why this crawls into my head and embeds itself so thoroughly. I'm sure many of you terrific, intelligent, and downright handsome readers have heard at some point that the cells comprising the human body are completely replaced every 7-10 years. That's not exactly true of all our cells, but it's true of a lot of them.

So at which point do our bodies (or at least much of our bodies) become not our original bodies? I mean...when you're born, you look really goddamn different from when you turn ten. You have the same memories and experience, but most of your body is completely new. When you're twenty, the same thing happens. Your body is more or less completely new.

Without absorbing even a little bit of the Time Vortex.

I don't even know where to go from here. Defining an object is hard enough with the Ship of Theseus paradox. Defining ourselves, though?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Svalbard Seed Vault!

One day, something terrible is going to happen to the Earth. I mean, the Earth will be alright. In most apocalyptic scenarios, the Earth will do just fine. That's not what people are really worried about when they say we need to save the planet.

No, what they mean is that we need to save ourselves. In a big ecological disaster, the crops we grow are going to become incredibly scarce. Maybe even extinct. That's problematic if you're a fan of eating. Even if you're strictly carnivorous, your food is not. I don't know why I feel the need to clarify this, but without crops, humanity is just...super dead.

Deader.

Luckily, we have a contingency plan. Yeah. That's not just something from disaster movies. There is a very real, very functional contingency plan with an out-of-the-way, isolated, 11th hour savior station and everything. It's called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and it is aptly named.

Because it's in Svalbard, is a global initiative, has seeds, and is a vault. It's that simple, yes.

Funded by various world governments and organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is humanity's insurance policy. It's the destination for real life post-apocalyptic scientists/farmers who want to save the world.

I'm gonna be honest. I want to make fun of this concept. I want to make light of it. At first glance, it's so bizarre that this place exists. At second glance, it's even more bizarre that it has funding.

But you know what? I can't. It's goddamn terrific that we, as a species, are planning so far ahead as to stuff a bunch of biodiversity into nature's refrigerator. All I can do is share it and reassure you that, should you find yourself starving due to a meteor, nuclear war, or massive blight, there's a little beacon of hope in one of the coldest places on Earth.

SUBTLE METAPHOR.

A place where you are legally required to carry a hunting rifle outside of towns so that you can defend yourself from polar bears, sure, but it's there. And one day, it may save the world.

And yes, I'm serious about the polar bear gun thing.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Platypus!

It was really only a matter of time before I got around to this one. Platypodes (that's the Greek plural form. There is no correct plural form. Look it up.) are what happened when nature had a few extra animal parts lying around and was drunk. They have the bill of a duck (hence the colloquial name), the feet of an otter, the tail of a beaver, and the good sense to live in Australia, home of the weird-ass animals of the world. It's also one of the five species of mammal that lays eggs.

That's something that really shouldn't be possible. Egg-laying is traditionally one of the red flags that say "NOT MAMMAL" in large, imposing letters. However, since the Platypus and its cousins have hair, produce milk, and generally play ball with the rest of the criteria, scientists decided to give them a pass.

Similar to how we sometimes allow this to be called a sport.

That's despite the Platypus flaunting its cloaca around the neighborhood. Where most mammals have various orifices for having a wee, a poo, or a baby, the Platypus streamlined the process into a single cloaca. I assume the main advantage of this technique is that it inspires a great deal of sympathy in other species for Platypus. "I'm not eating that thing," says the Rakali. "He's got it rough enough already with that cloaca business. No wonder they lay eggs."

At times, sympathy is not enough, and the Platypus is threatened. At other times, a human will spot a goofy specimen, and upon seeing its wittle beak and lovey-dovey eyes, will attempt to cuddle it. In both cases, the interlopers are in for one of the shittiest days of their lives. Because those cute little otter feet that Mr. Platypus boasts are good for both swimming and administering an excruciatingly painful venom.

Counter-intuitively, this should strike fear into your heart.

Platypus venom is known for two things: not killing you and making you wish it would. When a human is stung by the Platypus' spur, the area around the sting almost immediately swells, and the swelling rapidly spreads. Instead of wrecking shit in your body and causing pain as a result, Platypus venom goes straight to the pain receptors in your brain and manually flips your pain switch. Because it takes such a direct route, traditional opiate analgesics like morphine do literally nothing for you.

And he stares at you mercilessly all the while.

After a few days, the pain fades away. By which I mean it is replaced by hypersensitivity to any other pain. As in, "The wound feels better but every time you stub your toe you'll be fairly convinced that it needs to be amputated." While there are no deaths on record from Platypus venom, it may be one of the meanest venoms that nature has ever produced.

The Platypus is weird. Weird as hell. So weird, in fact, that when sketches of it first reached Europe, it was almost universally dismissed as a hoax. When a pelt arrived in England, scientists were still skeptical. Some even demanded to examine the body so they could find the stitches they just knew were holding that goddamn beak in place. Eventually, they had to admit that such a thing could possibly exist.

Truly, the Bigfoot of the Nineteenth Century. Except real.

And if you ever see one in the wild, then for god's sake, don't touch it. You will know the deepest depths of pain if it's in a foul mood.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Great Mississippi Flood!

Remember when Katrina hit New Orleans, and everyone talked about how it was the biggest natural, social, economic, and political disaster to ever be caused by the weather?

Well, it wasn't.

It didn't even end this guy's career.

That dubious honor belongs to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The Great Flood actually had its origins in 1926, when an unusually high volume of summer rain started testing the capacity of levees all along the Mississippi. By September, tributaries in Iowa and Kansas were ready to burst from their cages. By Christmas, the water level of the tributary Cumberland River had already reached 56.2 feet in Nashville, a record that still hasn't been topped.

Not even during this monstrosity

Finally, in the Spring of 1927, the levees started to break in earnest. 27,000 square miles of land along the river was devastated by the ensuing floods. That's almost the size of South Carolina. The flood hit areas of Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.

The damage clocked in at over $400 million, and 246 people lost their lives. In some areas, the flooding carried the force and twice the water volume of Niagara Falls. At its widest extent, the Mississippi grew to a staggering 60 miles, which is more than twice the size of the freaking Amazon at its greatest extent. During the wet season.

Take a close look at the map. It's big.

Politically speaking, the hardest hit area was New Orleans. State officials in Louisiana made some difficult and terrible decisions to protect the city. Decisions that involved literally blowing up nearby levees and intentionally flooding the Parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Then it got even messier.

Helpful.

The people of St. Bernard and Plaquemines were understandably a little miffed about having their homes destroyed by elected officials. That annoyance would later turn to downright anger when it turned out that the effort was entirely unnecessary anyway, and New Orleans had already been spared. Natural breaches in other levees relieved pressure on the levees around New Orleans, so their involuntary sacrifice was in vain.

Then it gets even messier.

At the time, most citizens of St. Bernard and Plaquemines were focusing on the whole "not drowning" part of daily life rather than the "whose fault is this" part. The government was happy to help with that, so long as you were white. If you were black, you had to wait your turn. Then you had to spend some time in a refugee camp with the kind of hospitality you would expect from House Frey.

Heh.

Then you would never, ever receive a dime of promised federal aid. And you'd be forced at gunpoint to rebuild levees. For some reason, "forced to work" and "not receiving a dime" sounds familiar in this context.

It was kind of shitty.

So the Republican Party sprang into action. They were in power at the time, and then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover had his eye on the White House for 1928. By promising a major effort for reform and the introduction of civil rights legislation, he was able to keep the story somewhat sub rosa. After he was elected, he weaseled his way out of it and started the grand tradition of the Republican Party losing the black vote -- a tradition which continues to this day.


The aftermath of the flood in the black community is also considered one of the main catalysts for the Great Migration, which eventually saw over 6 million black people pack up their shit and get the hell out of Dixie. It was one of the biggest internal demographic shifts in U.S. History, and it was more or less caused by the rain.


Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Smokey Bear!

"Only you can prevent forest fires!"

You're familiar with that phrase, right? Of course you are. In fact, 95% of adults in the United States recognize that phrase and know where it comes from. It's Smokey Bear's trademark rallying cry.

Smokey Bear was created in 1944 by the U.S. Forest Service to cut back on forest fires while most able-bodied potential firefighters were otherwise occupied. A few years earlier, Japan had actually staged an air raid in Oregon in order to make a wildfire happen. Fortunately, the pilots goofed up, dropped their incendiary bombs from the wrong altitude, and made it pretty easy for the local rangers to keep the situation under control.

It sure as hell got the country worried, though. First of all, Japan pulled off the first ever air raid on the continental United States. I mean...shit, right?

Not what you'd call an ideal situation

Secondly, the fire issue was brought to the forefront. Since there wasn't enough manpower to fight a full-blown wildfire, something had to be done to prevent them. Someone had to step up and make sure that the potential catastrophe of an unopposed wall of hellfire would never come to pass. Who do you suppose that someone was?

I'll give you two guesses.

Yeah. You. But Smokey Bear was the one to bring the message.

Named after "Smokey" Joe Martin, a New York City firefighter who suffered severe burns and blindness while rescuing fire victims, Smokey Bear became the face of fire safety in the wilderness. His legacy is one of the most successful (if ever so slightly misguided) PR campaigns in American history.

It probably helped that a real bear was given the name "Smokey" after being rescued from a tree during a wildfire. He was only a cub at the time, and he suffered severe burns to his wittle pawsies, which made the nation coo in solemn empathy. After his rescue, he was moved to the National Zoo, where he lived out his remaining 26 years in peace and comfort.

They even gave him a honey tree, and they left out the bees!

Are you wondering about that "misguided" parenthetical a few paragraphs back? Don't worry, I'm getting to that.

The thing about forest fires is that they've been happening since long before human beings existed. Conditions get dry sometimes, and lightning causes sparks, and those things together can result in quite the conflagration. Some forests have adapted to fire so thoroughly that their trees can't reproduce without it. Closed-cone pine forests require intense heat for their cones to open and release seeds.

Playing hard to get, eh?

Brush fires in other forests serve the important and obvious purpose of clearing out the brush. Brush is basically kindling. With small and regular brush fires, the kindling never bunches up to the dangerous levels necessary for catastrophic wildfires.

With that it mind, there's a bit of a conundrum with a famous anthropomorphic bear telling everyone to prevent forest fire, seemingly at all costs and with no exceptions. His message worked so well, in fact, that some forests have gone without fire for far too long. Local governments, made up of people who took Smokey's word as gospel, prevented the kind of fires that their forests desperately needed. That's part of the reason there are so many disastrous fires in the West in recent years.

Nowadays we have controlled burns to try to keep that shit from getting out of hand, and Smokey has lightened up a bit as a result. Instead of asking us to prevent all forest fires, he now specifies wildfires as the ones we want to avoid. And we do it, too. We prevent human-caused wildfires. We have fire safety drilled into our heads because a cute little bear told us to.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Rubber Duckies!

I'm just going to come right out and say it: rubber duckies made one of the most important contributions in history to the study of ocean currents. Yes. Those rubber duckies. The little yellow ones that squeaked at you in the bathtub back in the days when running around the neighborhood in a diaper didn't get your name entered into any ominous registries.

No, I said I wanted to embrace my inner child!

Their celebrated contribution to oceanography began on January 10th, 1992, when a storm near the International Date Line in the southern Pacific Ocean caused several containers to unexpectedly part with the cargo ship carrying them. One of them belonged to The First Years, Inc., a toy company that manufactures the Friendly Floatees brand of rubber duckies.

In fact, that very container carried 28,000 floating toys, chief among which was the yellow rubber ducky. The container somehow opened, the cardboard boxes disintegrated in the salt water, and the 28,000 toys began an arduous journey all over the world.

Ha ha, Science!

That's where Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham come in. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham are oceanographers, and in the early 1990s they were hard at work mapping out ocean currents. I don't know if you've ever tried mapping invisible movements under a cavernous body of water that covers 71% of the planet, but I imagine it's about as easy as painting an exact replica of the Sistine Chapel while wearing a blindfold and having never seen the original.

Except bigger.

When Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham, with their comically complicated surnames, caught wind of the rubber ducky story, they sprang into action. If, by "action," you mean "they waited until someone mentioned finding a random rubber ducky on a beach somewhere." That very thing happened about ten months after the incident in Alaska.

For decades now, the two scientists have been working closely with beach-combing communities (which, apparently, is a thing) to find out where in the world these rubber duckies are going. They use the information to map out the incredibly diverse natural highway of the world's oceans. As recently as 2007, they've been turning up in places as far-flung from the original incident as Chile, New England, and even Western Europe.

Can we all agree that the ocean's currents should be called The Ducky Lines?

If you're ever walking on the beach and happen to come upon a sun-bleached rubber ducky or beaver, a blue turtle, or a green frog, chances are you're looking at something that traveled around the world and became one the most important toys in the history of climate science.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, An Off Week!

I hope you'll forgive me for taking a week off, but I've been dealing with this:

Which smells like SHIT.

 Which led to this:

The bags plug up a shit hole. Literally. Toilet is in the family room. Home ownership, right?

And also (eventually) this:

No more mold but...you know...there used to be a floor here. And a laundry room.

But that's not even the best part. Wanna know the kicker? All of this miserable impromptu renovation can be traced back to a single, tiny spot. This asshole:

A pin prick on a half-inch segment of copper tube.

That's why I'm not researching anything this week. Because apparently, that little thirty-pixel dot (and yes, I checked) is all it takes to ruin your week. Or more.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Brood Parasites!

I was out in my backyard the other day when I heard an unfamiliar birdsong. Not a particularly rare one, but one I hadn't heard in my backyard before. It was this li'l fella:

I had to know what it was. Luckily, I got a good glimpse of him, and if you google "black bird with a brown head" he's the first three hundred results. Meet the conveniently named Brown-headed Cowbird, one of the biggest assholes of the avian world.

You see, the Brown-headed Cowbird is what ornithologists refer to as a brood parasite. Brood parasites are a bunch of lazy sons of bitches who can't be bothered to raise their own children. Instead, they lay their eggs in other species' nests. Like Phoebes.

She's lost a lot of weight since Friends

Imagine you're a pleasant little Eastern Phoebe, off hunting some insects or extra insulation for your freshly laid eggs. When you come back to your nest, you see that some nefarious Cowbird has surreptitiously placed her blatantly non-Phoebe egg in your very much Phoebe nest.

It's like they're not even trying to be subtle. (Spoiler Alert: They aren't)

You decide that enough is enough. You'll tolerate sharing the bird feeder with other species, but this is just insufferable. You nudge the damn thing over the edge of the nest and let it fall.

You've just made a terrible mistake. That's the avian equivalent of trying to abduct Michael Coreleone's children, and I mean that as literally as you can possibly mean a comparison between a Pacino character and a mid-sized bird.

What Cowbirds do in response is gleefully referred to as "mafia behavior." If a bird disposes of their free-as-in-kittens-not-as-in-beer eggs, the Cowbird will return to the nest and wreck the everloving shit out of it in furious vengeance.

It's a courtship dance, but I choose to think of it as him making an offer she can't refuse.

 
This behavior has been around for so long that smaller birds have adapted to it. Most of the time, if a Phoebe sees a suspicious egg in its nest, it'll gulp heavily and go about its business, raising the new chick as its own. Even though that often means the Phoebe's own offspring will be casually murdered by the much bigger and more demanding mafia bird baby.

All this comes down to one delightfully terrifying thought: Birds run protection rackets.

Holy shit.