A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac was a collection of essays Leopold was drafting when he died in 1948. His son finished editing them and published the collection a year later. This particular edition, released in 1970, also includes 8 entries from a separate collection of Leopold's essays, released in the 1950s under the title Round River.

The first 12 essays, totaling about 100 pages in this collection, are a description of different features of a farm Leopold and his family purchased in the 1930s, in a section of Wisconsin known as the Sand Counties. Because the ground is extremely sandy, and generally wasn't considered high-value for agriculture. The essays take different angles and writing approaches. February's centers around the felling of a single aged oak, Leopold describing major events in conservation or biology that took place during the decade of tree growth the saw is currently cutting through.

Meanwhile, July's starts with an early morning walk by Leopold and his dog, and all the things they encounter along the way, then switches to discussing a little patch of Silphium that had survived in the corner of a roadside graveyard until the road department removed the fence and mowed everything, and from there into discussion of relative biotic diversity of his farm versus the campus where he taught and how humans are the only species that can be aware of extinction and maybe that's what elevates us above other creatures.

That train of thought, that Man has this awareness (or maybe capacity for this awareness), and therefore a responsibility to be more thoughtful in how he interacts with the world around them, comes up more further into the book. Usually in terms of how we aren't exercising that responsibility. That the land is seen strictly as something to provide economic value for us, and anything that's value can't be quantified in dollars and cents, is easily dismissed as irrelevant. That everything about how we operate is extractive, and what's more, extractive without understanding how the parts of the system are interrelated.

So we remove all the prairie plants that helped make the rich soil we grow stuff in, then wonder why soil productivity declines such that, even with advances in technology or fertilizers, total yield isn't improved. Especially considering all the soil, and therefore farmable acreage, lost via erosion. That the fledgling conservation agencies of that time keep trying to sell farmers on programs to preserve soil, or preserve plant diversity, but they let the farmers pick and choose which to use. So the farmers only adopt the practices they think will make them money, right now (and usually demand money in exchange for adopting them.) 

I can confirm this was still a pretty regular line of approach in wildlife management a decade ago. If you want the farmers to plant some of their field in native grasses, you've got to show them how that'll help their cattle gain weight in the summer, so they make more when they sell them. Of course, they're trying to pay their bills so they don't lose their land, so I'm not really surprised. Maybe you'd like them to think a bit longer term, but that's hardly a failing exclusive to farmers.

And there are definitely passages in the second half of the book where Leopold's tone comes off condescending towards everyone who doesn't see things like him. He's on a bus in Illinois, and he makes a comment that a farmer is more focused on the fertilizer bill in his pocket that the land around him, or that most of the people aren't paying any attention to the plants they're passing, and would probably dismiss those plants as weeds if they did notice, but these prairie plants are the reason why their farms are so good and so on.

Or that it's all well and good the government designated certain lands as parks or preserves, but they need to stop encouraging people to go there by adding roads (which also serve to break up habitat.) He remarks he doesn't need to be able to actually travel to the wilderness in Alaska to appreciate it, so people shouldn't need to go to these other parks, either.

He wants people to respect nature and understand how many different factors go into it and how often removing one thing - a plant, animal, soil - can have unexpected effects, and so we need to appreciate everything beyond what it can do to fatten our wallets. I agree, more education focusing on those interconnections is good, although maybe he's underestimating how complicated organisms and biotic factors can get, and how much a particular person may have to focus on a specific area to gain any understanding of it. As someone whose work was always more in the field side than the lab side, I'm certainly with Leopold on the value of getting out there and making observations. There are limits to what you can do with that, however. Certainly in terms of what you can quantify. 

I think it helps people to understand that if they can actually go out and see it. Certainly felt like it helped me, and getting to be outdoors was its own reward. Sometimes, depending on the weather and/or number of ticks. But not everyone owns their own land like Leopold did, where they can just go wander around wherever they like, whenever they like. And not everyone can get jobs that pay them to be outdoors, observing nature or carrying out experiments on timber harvest or tree planting strategies. And frankly, a lot of the jobs of that nature that do exist, don't pay enough or run long enough to be a career.

It seems like Leopold expects everyone who can't get their own bit of nature to explore, to simply take the value of it on faith, sight unseen, rather than risk tarnishing it with their noisy, automobile-fueled vacation.

'Land is the place where corn, gullies, and mortgages grow. Country is the personality of the land, the collective harmony of its soil, life, and weather. Country knows no mortgages, no alphabetical agencies, no tobacco road; it is calmly aloof to these petty exigencies of its alleged owners. That the previous owner of my farm was a bootlegger mattered not one whit to the grouse; they sailed as proudly over the thickets as if they were guests of the king.'

Tracking Gobi Grizzlies - Douglas Chadwick

There is a sub-species of the brown, or grizzly, bear that lives in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. However, given that the confirmed population at the time this book was released (2017), was less than 3 dozen, they may not be around much longer.

Chadwick was the writer portion of a writer-photographer team sent to Mongolia for a piece about the Gobi grizzlies for National Geographic in 2011. Then he came back to help for another 4 field seasons. Similar to Imperial Dreams, the book spends a fair amount of pages describing the landscape and the culture of the area. That the Gobi is a desert, but it's a seasonally cold, almost constantly windswept region. In addition to getting very little rain - 4 inches is considered a normal annual precipitation, and there was a 15 year stretch prior from 1993 to 2007 where it averaged half that - this is not a desert of sand dunes, but of rock. Tough granite the wind gradually breaks into grit that gets into everything, including Chadwick's eye, as he gets eye infections two years running.

Still, Chadwick seems to love his time there, for how different it is from anything else he knows. He describes the size of it, the seemingly endless expanse, is almost disorienting at first, but he comes to feel more at home the more time he spends roaming in his down time.

Most of Chadwick's time is spent in a particular protected section of Mongolia, the Greater Gobi A Strictly Protected Area, as that's the only confirmed range the bears occupy. He discusses the lives of the local rangers and biologists, who protect and study the "GGSPA", the challenges they face in getting funding, the issues with demands to utilize the resources for other things.

This is not like a national park in the U.S., where people can drive in and gawk at the critters. Access is restricted, so it's not paying for itself in tourism dollars. Mongolia has a strong pastoral culture, so livestock herders are allowed to bring their animals into certain sections of the GGSPA in the winter months to graze. This at least keeps them from competing with the bears for food (the bears are hibernating), but it's probably more grazing pressure than the plant life can tolerate.

Also, the Gobi Desert is rich in minerals, and a lot of Mongolia's economy was based on mineral extraction. So there are companies trying to get the government to open the area up so they can tear it apart. And there are the "ninja miners", people who take advantage of the desert's size and isolation to sneak in and run covert, small-scale mining operations. If caught by the rangers, they might get a fine, and their equipment taken away. Even if they shoot the rangers, they may not face harsher penalties, if they know the right people. So Chadwick also discusses the push-and-pull of trying to get government officials on the side of protecting this place and its wildlife - apparently it also has the only population of wild Bactrian camels - and how quickly the level of support can shift with changes in the administration.

All that said, what this book has Imperial Dreams didn't is they actually find the bears. Not a ton of them; in an average field season maybe 2 bears get radio-collared after they end up in one of the feeder traps, though there are cameras set up around the feeders that capture images of many more. But enough Chadwick gets to see these animals up close, not just hear about them based on recollections of someone pulling up memories from half a century ago. They seem fascinating, if only for how different they are from what I picture when someone says "grizzly bear."

They're closer to the black bears we have in Missouri in size - the largest captured is slightly over 300 pounds, and there are a couple of young adult females that barely top 120 - and live mostly on plants. There's a stretch of a couple of pages where Chadwick describes trying to learn from one of the local biologists just what the heck these bears find to live on in this place, and since there's a language barrier, it comes to him pointing at various plants and miming like he's shoveling it into his mouth. (Apparently, one thing the bears eat in abundance is the tuber the local wild rhubarb have underground, but also the flowers of certain species.)

The nice thing with Chadwick coming back for several field seasons is you can see how the research group are trying to incorporate new ideas into their work, as they gain fresh information, and how well that does and doesn't work. The feeders are mostly grain pellets, but at one point, they try adding dog food to the mix to provide more protein, because the bears do eat flightless grasshoppers, gerbils, and small lizards. The bears ignore the dog food. Why? Unclear at that time, just like it's unclear why sometimes the bears will chew on a camel carcass (based on their poop), but other times they won't. However, adding additional feeders at the same oasis, but further away, so one bear can't monopolize the food source, seemed to give females with cubs more opportunities to get some extra calories they might not ordinarily have.

I also want to mention, this book has some outstanding photographs. Of the bears, and the people involved in the work, but also some double-page spreads of the actual terrain. I might not think so if I was actually wandering around out there, but it looks gorgeous, in a stark, austere kind of way. So maybe I would like it. I like open spaces; I'm the only person I know who likes traveling through western Kansas. 

'Trust me: semi-fresh grizzly shit full of partially fermented wild onion sprouts is definitely not a hoax.'

The Darkness Manifesto - Johan Eklof

It's a book about darkness, or what happens when there's less or no true darkness due to all the artificial light these days. The book is a bunch of short chapters, usually each on one particular topic. One chapter might be about how the lights from cities are screwing things up for baby sea turtles, whose instincts tell them to head for the brightest light. For a very long time, that's been the moon reflecting off the sea. Now it's big city lights.

Or Eklof might discuss how the human body reacts to shifts in light, the way natural light has decreasing amounts of blue in it as the day ends. And so your brain starts getting ready for sleep, and usually suppresses hunger, because if early Man went looking for a midnight snack, they were likely to become one instead. Now, between interior lighting and screens of our various devices (which pump out lots of blue light), our brains don't get the signal it's time for sleep at night. So we don't sleep, or we try but there's still too much light coming in through our windows for us to sleep well. And that fucks us up in a host of other ways.

The last part of the book discusses examples of cities or other places that have tried to reduce artificial light, or make it less intrusive. Light poles lower to the ground, covered so the light doesn't bleed into the sky. Hospitals that shift the wavelengths their interior lights put out depending on time of day to mimic natural light from the sun. Vineyards working to make themselves more bat-friendly, which also takes care of a lot of insect problems. There's a piece about China planning to build artificial satellites in geosynchronous orbits above certain cities, to act like extra-bright moons removing the need for artificial lights on the surface at night. That sounds a) completely nuts, b) likely to have a whole host of other problems, and c) probably will not be taken at face value by other countries.

The book is broadly organized, but with all these brief chapters - none longer than 6 pages - feels more like a collection of disparate essays than a single work. My experience was a chapter would begin, then end just as I was getting into the topic. Then he'd start talking about something else. Maybe it was closely related; instead of talking about how streetlights are having deleterious effects on the bats that avoid light (because all their prey are in places they don't go), talk about how certain moths rely on twilight as a mating time, and now the skies are too bright for them to attract mates. But sometimes the next chapter is about bioluminescence deep in the ocean, or how sensitive a giant squid's eyes are. 

I feel like I should appreciate his brevity, but it left me feeling dissatisfied. I was expecting more depth, or maybe more of the type of philosophical musings about the importance of darkness that we get in the last section of the book.

'When the insect sonic generator was tested on moths under streetlamps, however, the moths were seemingly deaf and had no reactions whatsoever. It seemed as if light misled their auditory system. But moths react differently to dangers depending on whether it's light or dark. Birds are the main threat during the day and bats at night.'

Punctuated Equilibrium - Stephen Jay Gould

For maybe a century after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection, the conventional wisdom was that this occurred through gradualism; that is, over the course of generations, a given species will slowly change and one day you look around and it's a different species. And the species it was before, is gone.

Problem: The fossil evidence for this was pretty thin. The response was that the fossil record just had too many gaps to properly catch the intermediate stages. In 1972, Gould and Niles Eldridge instead proposed the explanation of punctuated equilibrium. This argued that most species tended to remain the same for long periods, and then part of the population, usually isolated in some ways, shift to a new species in a short (in geologic terms) time period. The original species still exists alongside the newcomer, for a time.

This idea was apparently met with much harrumphing for at least a decade or two, but by 2007, when this book was published, it was gaining wider acceptance as the evidence to support it mounted. This book, which seems to be Gould covering the history of the concept, the arguments against it and the studies that investigated those claims, is strongest when it sticks to discussing actual research done to test the ideas of punctuated equilibrium and gradualism against the fossil record. He cites a lot of studies, done with a variety of phyletic groups, and he's usually able to summarize the findings in a clear manner, with accompanying charts to help the reader visualize. He makes it clear that he and Eldridge were never arguing that gradualism doesn't happen, only that it's far less common a driver of speciation than punctuated equilibrium. So when a study does show signs of speciation through gradualism, or at least, doesn't show signs it was through punctuated equilibrium, he makes sure to mention it.

One bit I found interesting was, Gould feels the idea of punctuated equilibrium has gotten people to place more importance on the notion of "stasis." Before, when it was all about gradualism, a species showing no change in the fossil record was treated as no data at all. If 39 of 40 species showed no change within a fossil formation and 1 showed gradualism, the paper would only discuss the 1 and ignore the 39. Gould and Eldridge argued lack of change is data, and needs to be considered as such. It's like how, if you decide to test the effect of substance x on substance y, your null hypothesis is probably, "there will be no effect." If that's the result you get, that isn't nothing. Now you know x does not affect y. If you were thinking x was responsible for a particular reaction or property observed in y, well something else must be responsible.

Likewise, one of the things I learned in college biology classes was the environment an organism (or species) exists in exerts selective pressure on the individual (or species.) Certain traits are going to convey an advantage for survival and reproduction. But then we have these species that their physical characteristics remain largely static (meaning the range of values remain largely the same) for millions of years. Why wasn't the environment exerting a pressure that pushed those characteristics one way consistently? A lot of the studies show the values fluctuate across that range over time, but stay around the same mean, until a sudden, relatively quick shift marks a speciation event.

All that said, the book can be a tough read. Largely because Gould won't say in 3 words what he can say in 40. There are sometimes multiple commas, a semi-colon and even a parenthetical, all in one sentence. It's exhausting and a little befuddling, in that the sentence becomes just a jumble of words where I've entirely lost the point he was driving at. He's worst about that when focused more on theory or controversy, which is part of why I prefer the sections where he describes actual research. Having data to explain seems to focus his writing. Either way, this does not feel like a book written for a general audience.

'We can distinguish the punctuations of rapid anagenesis from those of branching speciation by invoking the eminently testable criterion of ancestral survival following the origin of a descendant species. If the ancestor survives, then the new species has arisen by branching. If the ancestor does not survive, then we must count the case either as indecisive, or as good evidence for rapid anagenesis - but in any instance, certainly not as evidence for punctuated equilibrium.'

Extinction - Douglas H. Erwin

The specific extinction being discussed in the end Permian version, the largest mass extinction event we're aware of in the planet's history. Erwin takes a methodical approach, breaking down the scale of the extinction based on fossil evidence. From there, he spends a chapter laying out the major hypotheses, ranging from meteorite impact to volcanism, to anoxic oceans, to sea level drop and several others besides. In an approach I really appreciated, he discusses what kinds of evidence scientists would need to find to support each hypothesis.

After that, there's chapters spent on what's actually been discovered. Some of this is more interesting than others. The part about their managing to get a fairly brief timespan for the extinction - brief in geologic time, we're still talking maybe a half-million years - was kind of cool. So were the parts about the difficulty in doing comparative ages between marine and land rock formations, because you may not be able to age them by radioactive decay, and their fossil records rarely overlap. However, Chapter 7 focuses on the levels of various minerals in the oceans around the end-Permian, and when Erwin got deep into carbonate levels and what the different levels tell them about where the carbonate was at a given time, I was struggling not to fall asleep. I didn't really retain any of that chapter.

Still, the evidence laid out - and this is what they had available when the book was published in 2006 - Erwin returns to the hypotheses described earlier and goes through them, discussing which ones lack evidence, or which ones appear outright refuted by the evidence. For example, the oceans apparently rose during the Permian mass extinction, which kind of chucks the notion sea level drop caused the problem out the window.

He also acknowledges the spots where they just don't have enough evidence, or are working with too small a data set. So far, no one had found an iridium layer in the rocks like the one that marks the meteor that hit near the end of the dinosaurs. Or any of the shocked quartz or other geologic markers they think distinguish such impacts. But Erwin points out that those may just have been unique to that particular meteor, that if a meteor did hit near the end of the Permian (and there are some possibilities, but no definite impact site as of 2006), there's no reason to assume it was also high in iridium.

(He does, if you're wondering, offer his own perspective on what he think caused the extinction. It's not quite what he calls his "Murder on the Orient Express" hypothesis, but it's not a simple, one cause thing, either.)

For the most part, Erwin tries to keep things from getting too technical. He includes graphs and charts to highlight things like the extent of the basalt floods that appear to be evidence for massive volcanism (albeit the cause is unclear), so the book only sometimes falls into a wall of text. He describes the part he's taken in the research, and the times he was wrong (he apparently jumped with both feet onto the "sea level drop" bandwagon when it was first proposed.) I don't think he's slanted towards one hypothesis or another in his presentation, but I don't know all the data, so I don't know what he's not saying. He mentions some of his colleagues may feel he's giving their sides short shrift, but it at least feels like he's laying the data out for the reader, but also discussing what it doesn't say for certain. There may be a huge drop in sedimentation for a brief period, but the cause of it could be many things.

'This may seem paradoxical, but the destruction of brachipods or ammonoids was so complete that it makes it difficult to say anything useful about the actual cause of the extinction. The essence of solving the problem of differential extinction is being able to compare similar winners and losers. A clade where all species survived is not particularly edifying; nor is a group that almost completely disappeared.'

The Way of Coyote - Gavin van Horn

The book is about wildlife in urban areas. Van Horn starts with several short chapters discussing different types of wildlife he encountered since moving to Chicago, or at least encounters that felt significant to him. Spotting a coyote loping across a golf course near dusk, or learning peregrine falcons have turned skyscrapers into their own cliffside nesting sites.

The section second of the book is still focused on wildlife, but less about how wildlife have adapted to what humans built up for ourselves, and more about how the city has changed, in ways great and small, intended and otherwise, that have prompted some sort of response in wildlife. A robin nests near a school, and some teacher placed cones around the tree with a sign advising the children to not disturb the birds. The city improving its sewage treatment, so that waterways are less polluted and pelicans can use them as stops on migration, or night herons can pick their way through the reeds.

In the third and final section, he turns to things we can do that will make cities more compatible with wildlife, but also improve the cities for ourselves. Walking or biking trails also provide corridors that connect chunks of suitable habitat for many creatures. A woman is spearheading a neighborhood program (along with another program for backyard vegetable gardens and things like that) encouraging people to plant beds of pollinator species on the corners. It helps butterflies, but also beautifies the neighborhood and maybe promotes a sense of community.

Van Horn cites conservationist Aldo Leopold, philosopher Lao Tzu, and the Coyote of many myths as major influences in his thinking for this book, and starts sections of the book with short tales (which van Horn apparently came up with) of Coyote encountering the city and trying to find a way to make humans more aware of other life. The spiritual aspect doesn't always land with me. When he's citing the Tao Te Ching on the paradoxical weakness and strength of water in chapters about the waterways around Chicago, it feels like a bit of a put on, at the least a stretch. Trying to give the book an air of something more, enlightened or scholarly.

It may not be that; van Horn talks a lot about how seeing herons when he kayaks, or making eye contact with a bison at a restored prairie, makes him feel. His arguments in favor of remaking cities to be more collaborative with the earth and nature aren't strictly ecological, and certainly not economic. He believes allowing nature more room in cities, rather than trying to confine or eradicate it, helps connect people with the world, and that this is very important. Even if I wouldn't describe my reactions to being in nature or seeing wild things near to home in the same way as van Horn, I'd agree with him on that.

'So while restoration ecology involves diminishing human impact in particular places so that other beings can thrive or reestablish themselves, reconciliation ecology advances the position that humans can create and build novel systems that are suited to other species. In short, by understanding the behaviors of other species and what they require to meet their needs, we can deliberately create places of cohabitation.'

Secret Life of the City - Hannah Bjorgaas

Bjorgaas is back home in Oslo after the conclusion of a job as a tour guide for Antarctic cruises and feeling a bit at a loss, starts taking long walks within the city. These walks make her more aware of the elements of nature which exist and even thrive in an urban environment. 

The book is her exploring those elements through her own observation or conversations with experts. One chapter might focus on ants, seen through the prism of her discovering a line of them from a colony outside her porch into her kitchen. She'll describe how ants and their colonies function, the different roles, the importance of smell or touch for communication, the relationship certain species have with the aphids infesting her bean sprouts.

Or she might discuss seagulls. How their numbers are diminishing in the wild, while thriving in the city. This includes a ferry trip to the fishing islands of Fleinvaer, once home to abundant gull and tern populations. There's an effective bit where the fisherman who takes her out there cuts the engine and they just bob offshore. No sounds of calling birds, where they were once abundant.

Bjorgaas and the people she speaks with discuss current or past research on the species she focuses on (Bernd Heinrech and John Marzluff both get mentioned in the chapter about crows), but she works to keep the information accessible to laymen. How the aphids' waste provides nutrients the ants don't get from the rest of their diet, or how the types of lichen that dominate cities has change from those that thrive with high sulfide content in the air to those that can handle high nitrogen content as air pollution laws have prompted changes.

Bjorgass attempts a few studies of her own, from nighttime surveys of calling birds to trying to bury underwear in different soils to study decomposition as a measure of soil micro-biome health. That last one ends up being especially funny as one of her urban locations has been torn up and paced over in just the few weeks since she buried it. The scientist she had spoken to told her that often the soils in cities didn't originate there, but was scraped off from somewhere else and trucked in, then compacted to the point it's a poor growing medium.

'As I sat under the beech tree, it felt like I was eavesdropping on the blackbird's private chat room: the night. Not only do city blackbirds switch to a higher frequency in order to talk to each other in peace, they have also found their own rhythm: they start singing up to five hours earlier than their cousins in the forest.'

Chasing Kangaroos - Tim Flannery

This book is largely about kangaroos. Their past and development, what we know of it, and also their present, as the world around them continues to shift. It's often detailed through Flannery's stories about his own travels around Australia. Sometimes for work, but in the early chapters, it's he and a friend using the Christmas break between semesters to try and circumnavigate Australia on their motorcycles. Mechanical breakdown and subsequent arson cuts the trip short.

The stories include a lot of descriptions of the colorful characters Flannery meets along the way, something that continues once he's visiting different locales as part of fossil studies. This includes a cook for a sheep-shearing crew who is very happy to meet Flannery at first, but becomes increasingly unfriendly because he heard "paleontologist" as "opossum", and thought Flannery was there to get rid of the opossums breeding and squabbling in the ceiling of the bunkhouse. It results in a casual tone which makes the book at times feel like almost a travelogue or reminiscence.

Which is not to say the book skimps on details about the animals. I did learn a lot about kangaroos. How spotty the fossil record is, for one thing. There's a (or perhaps was, the book was published in 2004) gap between roughly 50 to 20 million years ago where they have basically nothing, which makes it hard to figure out the radiation and evolution of characteristics. Plus other smaller gaps closer to the present, during which certain group seem to vanish entirely, while others explode in frequency. Also how many species there, once you include wallabies, tree-kangaroos, rat-kangaroos, padamelons, which I guess I wasn't thinking of as "kangaroos", so much as other types of animals altogether.

As you'd guess, there's a lot of peculiar, specialized biology in kangaroos. In some species, the female can get pregnant while still nursing another joey. Their body takes advantage of the forces generated by hopping to make respiration easier, by having the gut essentially push against the lungs to expel air. There are trade-offs. A roo's foot can't really rotate left to right, due to the features that reinforce it against the impact on the ground.

In the travels of youth portions of the book, Flannery frequently describes encounters with Indigenous Australians, who he had apparently never seen prior to his motorcycle journey. He'll describe the circumstances of their lives in the brief glimpses he gets. Poverty or how wishing a "Merry Christmas" can result in an explosion of anger from an elderly man who had been entirely genial up to then. It feels out of place initially, Flannery deciding to throw his guilt about how the Indigenous Australians had been done wrong.

But he brings it around in the latter stages when he discusses the species that are under dire threat from introduced predators, habitat loss, or climate change. He points to how the Indigenous Australians have been an integral part of the how the kangaroos have evolved or declined for many thousands (at least 40,000) years, and how barring them from their traditional practices, such as burning, have impacted the animals as well as the people. That there is a lot about these animals that white Australians, including himself, know very little about, and may never know if the species is truly extinct, because no one bothered to ask the people who'd been hunting and interacting with them for millennia.

'The Lani were absolutely right, for the kangaroo is host to the worms, which it feeds chewed leaves, while the creature itself feeds upon the worms and their by-products. Thus, in a very real sense, some kangaroos eat worms even though they swallow leaves or grass.'

An Immense World - Ed Yong

In the opening chapter, Yong introduces the term "Umwelt," used by a German biologist in 1909 to describe how an organism perceives the world around it. It's compared to houses, each with their own unique configuration of windows. Essentially, that there is a variety of sensory information all around us, but not all animals perceive the same aspects, or in the same fashion.

From there, it each chapter focuses on a different type of sense, and the various ways they're expressed by animals. It isn't, as Yong takes pains to stress in the chapter about smell and taste, about how much "stronger" one organism's sense may be than another's. After all, if you say a dog's sense of smell is 5 times greater than a human's, what's that mean? They can smell things five times further away, five times fainter, retain the scent in its absence for five times longer?

No, the point is how they differ, and how this informs the way those animals perceive the world and exist in it. So in the chapter on hearing, Yong notes that not all insects can hear, but that for those that can, the ears are located in almost any location you could conceive of. Often, the location of the ears is related to what specifically they're trying to hear.

Crickets have ears on their legs, and when they detect the call of a potential mate, that information causes the legs to move towards that sound even before the information could be transmitted to the brain. Sharks have their electric sense, via the Ampullae of Lorenzini, and researchers noticed that when an electric current is passed in front of a shark's snout, it blinks. This is because that sense has an limited effective range. It's the one sharks use right before they bite, and sharks take pains to protect their eyes before they bite. The detection of the electric current prompts that response.

Yong talks with a lot of different researchers about a wide variety of animals, covering senses from sight and sound, to the perception of pain or magnetic fields. Different senses are better studied than others - taste was relegated to a half-dozen or so pages at the end of the scent chapter, because not much work's been done with it - while vision got one chapter for sight, and one specifically about seeing color.

Of course, the matter of the other animal's Umwelt is theoretical, because even if we can know that certain insects see ultraviolet light, or that frog embryos can detect the particular vibrational frequency of a snake chewing and begin hatching in response, we can't really know what those things "feel" like for them, because the animals can't tell us. We can chart what section of a bat or dolphin's brain activates when it receives its echolocation information, but do they "see" it in their mind the way that Daredevil does? What does a geomagnetic sense look like?

In that way, the book can only go so far, but I think Yong knew that going in. His point is for us to be more aware that other animals do have very different perspectives of the world, and we can have impacts in ways we don't consider. The last chapter is about the problems of light pollution on insects and migrating birds, noise pollution on songbirds or whales, undersea cables throwing off electric senses. Those things don't seem to hamper us, so we don't consider them, but for creatures who look at the world through different windows, it's a problem.

'If Speiser is right about this bizarre setup, it means that even though each individual scallop eye has good spatial resolution, the animal itself might not have spatial vision. It knows when eyes in a certain region of its body have detected something, but it has no visual image of that object.'

It's a Lightweight, Watery World

I came across a thread somewhere back in the fall, discussing the size of the world where One Piece takes place. The model someone posted listed the diameter of the planet at over 61,000 km. That's 10,000 km larger than Uranus, half the size of Saturn, 5x bigger than Earth. A quick Google search revealed arguments that it's actually around 35,000 km, or maybe over 420,000 km (3 times the size of Jupiter.)

To be clear, I have no idea what any of these measurements are based on. Presumably any mentions of height or depth in the manga or anime. Almost certainly extrapolating from maps we see of specific places, combined with references to distances or travel times. Maybe some data books? Probably also based on how long it takes the Straw Hats to get from one end of the first half of the Grand Line to the other, which would be half the circumference of the planet, plus average sailing speeds for the different ships they used.

Not sure how you incorporate the time they were drifting through the air with a giant octopus for a balloon, or the Thousand Sunny being able to rocket through the sky, but I'm sure those folks manage.

Back to the original point. There's also the above still of the Library on Ohara. Some people take this as a model of their world, meaning it's orbited by several moon. So the notion floated in the thread was, this is the Doylist explanation for how ridiculously strong everyone is, since even the "weak" characters survive falls or being thrown through walls that would kill any of us. The planet is huge, the gravity is higher, so these folks are all really strong from moving under heavy gravity. Kind of like early Superman (before it became the yellow solar radiation powering him), or Charlie-27 from the OG Guardians of the Galaxy.

It doesn't really work, since those characters demonstrate their strength and resilience in places they move to with weaker gravity. All the One Piece characters are on their birth planet all the time, minus the crazy guy that flew his giant airship to the Moon because he thought it was the proper place for a god like himself. And he says he's traveling to the moon, singular, and no one asks him to specify which moon, implying there's only one. There's also never a sign of multiple moons in the sky during any night scenes, which wouldn't be difficult to do if that was actually a feature of the planetary system Trigun, for example, made sure to show more than one moon, because that was part of the setting.

It's more likely the image is the current conception of the entire solar system, and those poor suckers are still trapped in a geocentric view of the universe. It would at least fit with their society, where you have a bunch of "nobles" living in a city atop a mountain, proclaiming they control everything and everyone else is theirs to kill or enslave as they wish. Of course they'd insist the entire universe revolves around them.

I wonder how that impacts navigation in a world so dependent on traveling at sea. You rarely see anyone sail at night, for example, or reference using the stars, even before the main characters got to the Grand Line, where the special compass always points to another island. But the observed difference in the movements of the stars when assuming they orbit your world, doesn't seem like enough to impact navigation, based on a brief look online.

Back to the gravity. What I'm thinking, the peculiar physics and resilience seen in One Piece aren't a result of their growing up on a huge world with gravity several times stronger than Earth's. Rather, while their world may be much larger, its gravity is actually weaker, due to a low density. My example was going to be Saturn, because I remembered my old astronomy books stating its gravity was only 93% that of Earth's, since it was less dense than water. The old, "It would float in water, if you could find a tub to hold it" bit. They appear to have gained new data, and its gravity is actually 107% Earth's.

Still, the basic idea holds. The world is largely covered by water, which is theoretically only as dense as. . .water. The islands scattered about vary in size, but most seem like they could be crossed on foot within a week, if not less. I don't think there are many the size of Cuba, let alone Greenland or Australia. There's one continent, actually a mountain range that encircles the globe (albeit broken up occasionally by water.) It rises from the sea floor, which is known to be 10,000 meters deep, and extends to at least cloud level.

I can't find anything more concrete on the height of the Red Line, though there are cities on clouds 10,000 meters up, and we don't hear about those colliding with the Red Line, so it may not reach that high. Even capped at less than 20,000 meters in total height, it's well above Mauna Kea, which is 10,200 meters from the sea floor to peak. Lower gravity would allow for taller mountains, like Olympus Mons on Mars, which is 24,000 meters high.

Given the lack of larger landmasses on the planet, and the amount of surface area covered by water, I don't know that there's much tectonic activity. Certainly not many active volcanoes. No evidence of recent plate tectonics, which might suggest a cooling core and mantle. Which would likely mean little to no magnetic field. You could probably handwave in something about cosmic radiation and Devil Fruits if you wanted, but I'm thinking in terms of what this means for the internal composition of the planet. 

Earth's high density is the result of its iron-nickel core. Same for Mercury. One Piece's Earth might lack those elements, or lack them in great amount, or they're diffuse throughout the interior. Occasionally there's enough activity to push some through the crust and you get an island. If there's no spinning core to create a magnetic field, all you have are each islands personal magnetic field. Why this only happens on the Grand Line and not any of the Blues, I don't know, but I might as well guess while we're here.

The Grand Line is banded by two stretches of water with no winds or currents, which suggests some sort of weird thing. Maybe there was one major event that created the Red Line (some sort of internal contraction that crumpled the crust in the middle?) and broke up existing current and wind patterns, creating a stretch of geologic time with limited activity, forming the islands in the Grand Line. The disruption of global currents created new ones in each of the "Blues", and that created deposition zones where material collected and over a very long time, built islands out of sedimentary rock, rather than igneous. Different composition, no magnetic field.

End result, the characters run faster, jumper higher, fall from great heights, and its easy because the gravity is low. If the planet does lack in heavier metals, you could explain how easily characters are knocked through or destroy buildings as the available stone being less sturdy and metal being somewhat scarce. Lower gravity would likely mean lighter, more fragile bones, since supporting the body would be easier, too. But we do see characters (especially Usopp) wrapped up in bandages or body casts frequently, without suffering any long-term damage. So the bones are light and break easy, but possibly that makes them easy to put back together.

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere - Paulette F.C. Steeves

When I was in school, they taught that the first humans came to the Western Hemisphere across the Bering land bridge around the last Ice Age. What they didn't teach me was the notion these people, from Canada to Patagonia, where all part of one big culture called the "Clovis Group", based on a certain type of bifacial stone tool that had been found in different locations.

Just as well I didn't learn about that, since it's a load of crap. Steeves spends a couple of chapters in the middle of the book describing various sites across North and South America with archaeological evidence that humans reached these continents well prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Many of these sites are in the 15-20,000 year old range, but there are still others evidently older than 40,000 years, and a few that are over 100 or even 200,000 years old.

Those oldest sites are located around what's now the Valsequillo Reservoir in Mexico, so if people were there at that time, it's certainly possible they were elsewhere prior to that, especially if they did arrive by crossing the Bering land bridge at some other point when it was above water. Or, as Steeves mentions, if people could reach Australia by boat 60,000 years ago, reaching the Western Hemisphere by island hopping across the Aleutians would seem more than manageable.

Steeves mentions a few other theories about how humans reached these continents, including by crossing the Atlantic instead. I'd have liked to read more about that, but that's not really what the book is about. Much of the focus is on the pushback by American archaeological authorities against any sites that would contradict the Clovis hypothesis. Disputing the interpretation of damage to animals bones, the aging of the stratum where the artifacts were found, denying they're artifacts at all, instead arguing it's just a bunch of rocks that broke a certain way under some natural process. Steeves agrees that there are a lot of sites that deserve further investigation and study, but she feels this immediate resistance without even examining the evidence actually shuts that down rather than encouraging it.

I'll admit I never fully grasped the point Steeves was trying to make about why these people were so hellbent on denying that humans reached the Western hemisphere further back than they first thought. There's a lot of discussion of entrenching colonialist interpretations to protect their power and status, and the need to challenge these interpretations, which often rely on little to no evidence. The book discusses how insisting on such a geologically recent arrival diminishes the claim of First Nations people that these are their ancestral lands.

12,000 years still seems like a long enough time to solidly establish that to me, but perhaps in comparison to Australia, for example, being settled 5 times longer ago, it doesn't. I just figure if the academic authorities couldn't use the argument of length of habitation, they'd find some other reason why the entire hemisphere was open territory and nothing was stolen.

But Steeves is also focused on how it impacts First Nations' communities, by disconnecting them from their heritage, traditions and culture, much of which has been passed down orally for hundreds or thousands of years. Having that be denied, being told it's incorrect, inaccurate, not the right kind of evidence, diminishes it and the people it's connected to. 

Steeves gives a few examples of oral histories of different peoples that pointed to major archaeological finds. That was another thing I'd have like to read more about, because I've wondered in the past how one parses through spoken word history to separate fact from myth. Again, it's a small part of the larger point she's trying to make about how there is abundant evidence that the Clovis/Last Glacial Maximum idea that's taught in schools here in the States is bunk, and that needs to be made more widely known and get less baseless resistance from the entrenched establishment.

I expected the book to delve more into the archaeology and past lives of the earliest people to live in the Western Hemisphere. In that sense, it wasn't really what I was looking for, but what it was wound up be highly informative in its own right.

'What I am implying is for an Indigenous group to be in the Amazon or Eastern Brazil over 22,000 or 50,000 years ago, they most likely had to have walked there and in doing so left their stories on the land in many areas on their way to, say, Pedra Furada in Brazil or Monte Verde in Chile, or to Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania or the Cerutti site near San Diego, California, which is dated to minimally 130,000 years ago.'

Mars Crossing - Geoffrey A. Landis

A 6-person research mission to Mars goes downhill fast when an unforeseen mishap destroys the habitat they were supposed to live in for months, along with the return shuttle and one of the crew. With no other options, they try to cross most of the planet in the hopes of flying a Brazilian shuttle left behind at the north pole after its crew died unexpectedly.

Except that shuttle can't carry more than 2 people. 3, at the most.

Landis takes the approach that space will surprise you. He takes pains to describe the amount of training the crew went through, the briefings, the screenings to make certain these people could do this. The number of redundancies and safety back-ups in the equipment. But catastrophe still occurs, because there were elements of being on Mars or space that people on Earth weren't prepared for.

An unexpected condition that causes the oxygen sensors of their space suits to malfunction. If caught in time, it can be addressed. If there's someone not yet affected to save the people dying from low oxygen. It plays up how hostile an environment Mars is, for all that it's relatively similar to Earth. But also that there may be workarounds available to human ingenuity.

He also sticks to very short chapters. Some of them no more than a paragraph, but hardly any longer than 3 or 4 pages. He splits the book into sections, each one focusing on one of the five survivors, and alternates between the backstory and what's happening in the present. Although the present-day chapters may not pay much attention to the character under the microscope in the flashbacks, which seems strange, but it's necessary if he's going to add any depth to most of them before the end of the book.

The writing is a bit clunky and stilted. Overuse of certain words in close proximity, in situations where it was probably wasn't necessary the second. I would find myself stopping after a sentence, thinking it could have been written much more smoothly. It's almost technical, someone preparing a report and wanting to be extremely precise. Except, not done so the reader interprets this as how a particular character thinks about things. It's just how Landis writes.

'After a few minutes, Brandon stopped.

"That's it?" Ryan asked.

"I think so. A hundred and twenty. You think that record will last?"

Ryan nodded. To every direction, the landscape was barren, sterile rock. Nobody was here. Nobody had ever been here before, and if the expedition failed to reach the return rocket, probably no humans would ever return.

"Yes," he said. "I expect it will last quite a while."'

The Wise Hours - Miriam Darlington

Darlington's writing about owls. What starts as a desire to see all the species native to England expands, through offers and stories sent to her by friends, to trying to see all the species native to Europe. She doesn't manage that, not being able to swing the trips to Lapland to see some of the tundra species, but she does travel to Serbia to see the Long-eared Owl, and to a special preserve in France to see the Pygmy Owl.

The book isn't simply a travelogue, though Darlington does go into some detail about the experiences of her trips to see these various owls, as well as the sense of community she feels with the people she meets on these trips.

But the book is still largely about the owls themselves. Darlington talks about the ecology of each species. Their calls, their mating and hunting habits, their predation risks, the dangers that come from being around humans. Fast cars and low-flying owls are a bad combination, as are rodenticides and animals that eat rodents.

But it's also about how humans perceive them, and have over the ages. The way owls appear in ancient cave paintings, the stories and myths and human characteristics we assign to them. The feelings seeing or hearing one evokes in us. Darlington writes often of the wonder or excitement she feels at seeing these owls, or even the anticipation of seeing one. She also veers too far into "humans today don't respect nature" a few times, complaining about our disconnection compared to our ancestors. 

Right, our ancestors who knew fuck-all about owls except they flew at night and so must be evil or a bad omen. As opposed to now, when we study them and learn about their habitat requirements and take steps to help them survive.

Darlington also tries to weave in mysterious health issues that afflicted her son during the time she was writing this. I think because he's also fascinated by owls, and that shared interest was some piece of normality as they grappled with whatever was attacking him. But with each chapter largely its own essay, only loosely connected to one another, that thread doesn't hold up. It's unmentioned entirely in some chapters, and like her quest to see all the different types of owls, isn't neatly tied up at the end. Which wouldn't be a problem, except it becomes something that doesn't quite mesh.

'His wings splayed, soundless from the velvety fringes on his primary feathers. The silent arrival must have freaked out our ancestors. The wings of all the other birds make a noise when they fly. Why not with this one? And as the Tawny Owl silently hunts, all the other birds go mad with alarm. What could be more eerie?'

How Far the Light Reaches - Sabrina Imbler

The subtitle of the book is, "A Life in Ten Sea Creatures," and in each chapter Imbler discusses a different aquatic animal. Goldfish in one, sturgeon another, cuttlefish later on. In each chapter Imbler likewise discusses some aspect of their own life, of their effort to come to some sort of understanding with themselves.

So Chapter 3 switches between paragraphs about the Chinese sturgeon, still trying to reach breeding grounds on the Yangtze River that have long since been blocked by dams, and discussing Imbler's maternal grandmother, who grew up in China in the first half of the 20th Century, and fled their home to escape the Japanese Army. Their grandmother is in cognitive decline, and to some extent seems to be returning to those earlier days, speaking only Chinese, recalling mostly how things once were.

Chapter 5 parallels how life clings to the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, with the places queer people find or make for themselves. Those places can be precarious - eliminated by the cessation of magma flow or gentrification - but somehow the life persists and takes root in a new location that supports it.

It's not always a pleasant read - in one chapter, Imbler discusses a stretch of their life where they would frequently get drunk at parties and wake up the next morning with no recollection of what happened between them and the men beside them - but it's also a hopeful book in some ways. It took time, there were apparently many failed relationships, Imbler struggles to understand themselves independent of whoever they were dating, struggles to get comfortable with who they are.

But the final chapter, which discusses the immortal jellyfish, able to regress to the medusa stage in response to severe injury and produce clones of itself a thus-far endless number of times - suggests Imbler reached an internal equilibrium. Imbler can't return to childhood and start over with a better grasp of who they were from the start (the jellyfish sections alternate with accounts from other individuals about what point they'd like to go back to and speak with their younger selves), but they can keep trying to find what identity fits. They aren't immortal, but they are alive. The opportunity still exists.

'Thought the yeti crab's environment seems inhospitable to us, it is nothing to be pitied. The pressure does not crush the crab, and the darkness does not oppress it. It is exactly suited to the life it leads, however strange or repulsive we might find it.'

Living Fossil - Keith S. Thomson

The coelacanth is a type of fish that was presumed extinct since before the dinosaurs died out, until one was caught and identified scientifically in the late 1930s off the coast of South Africa. It was a new species, not one of the fossilized species, but still a big deal. Thomson details the history of that find and the subsequent search for more individuals and more information.

The book was published in 1991, so its information ends in the 1980s. At that point, the individual found in South Africa was the only one found anywhere other than the Comore Islands. This factors into other parts of the book, where Thomson details the territorial view that descends as scientist from around the world want to catch and dissect their own coelacanth. One problem being, with so little information on how many there were, how large their range was, how quickly and abundantly they reproduce, there was a possibility the mad dash for coelacanths would wipe them out. At the very end, Thomson suspects Latimeria (the genus of this particular coleacanth) might be the first made extinct by scientists.

(Wikipedia tells me there are now two recognized extant species, one around the Comores and East Africa, the other around one island of Indonesia.)

The middle of the book is devoted to detailing what scientists had actually figured out about Latimeria, and how, given the limited number of specimens and how rarely they'd been observed in the wild (at that time, limited to Hans Fricke getting a submersible and recording them). Thomson discusses how aspects of the fish's anatomy resemble those found in other species, and how this enabled them to confirm the depths it likely lives at. The eyes of all the captured specimens had a milky coating, not present in the videos from the sub. Scientists were able to figure out the coating was the eyes being damaged by the pressure change as the fish was hauled to the surface.

There's a large section of one chapter devoted to the question of reproduction, based on inference from observations of Latimeria ovaries versus other fish. Do males and females release a bunch of eggs and sperm into the water and just roll the dice, or does the female carry fertilized eggs for a time internally, or is it live birth? Granted that without field observations, comparing them to what sharks or other fish do is almost guesswork, but Thomson's thorough without getting too bogged down in technical discussion about how they find as much evidence as they can to support a hypothesis.

'Everyone agrees that coelacanths were not the immediate ancestor, so they don't have quite the pride of place that one would like. But they are one of the only four genera of living lobe-finned fishes to remain out of the great Devonian radiation of lobe-finned fishes that was crucial to the matter.'

Subterranean - James Rollins

Evidence is found of an intelligent civilization beneath the earth in Antarctica. An intelligent civilization that would predate humans by a couple million years. So a group of specialists is gathered to venture into the caverns and explore the geology, biology, and evidence of culture they can find. With a military escort, because what is neglected in the sales pitch is this isn't the first team to be sent down there.

As it goes, this is akin to Natural Selection, which at the time I compared to a more fanciful Michael Crichton book. Really, I think these are more updated Jules Verne stories, just wildly implausible stuff, but it makes for a good adventure. Quick to read, not too complicated, plot keeps moving with limited space devoted to characters struggling with the stresses of their situations. Not no space devoted to it, but not much. Rollins has got places for the story to go. 

The scientists encounter giant predatory creatures that look a bit like a crocodile that walks on hind legs, but have poisonous spines on their backs, because they're actually monotremes (mammals that lay eggs.) There are several varieties of fungus, including one that produces anesthetic spores in response to body heat so it can break down the slumbering prey for food.

And, of course, the subterranean civilization, which are essentially humans, but if they evolved from monotremes rather than placental mammals. And some of them have telepathic abilities, and may have influenced Indigenous Australians. . .somehow. Or interbred with them? The caving expert on the team is apparently Indigenous Australian on his grandmother's side, though he looks like a white dude, and he's somehow able to unlock this same ability.

I mean, these people were in Australia at some point, but the land bridge between it and Antarctica was submerged or otherwise broken, Antarctic surface climate became inhospitable, so they went underground. I'm not sure the timelines line up frankly. I guess maybe if these people were still able to access Australia up to the last Ice Age, but I feel as though they'd have advanced further technologically than they did if they were already able to carve tools and cave dwellings and art underground 5.2 million years ago, as we're told early on.

I know, I know, just go with it for the sake of the story, but this stuff interests me, like the ecology and atmospheric conditions of all those weird-ass planets in the Riddick movies.

There's a romantic subplot about the caving expert and the archaeologist that leads the team feeling attracted to each other, but she's reluctant to open up emotionally. And she's a divorced single mom, so her son is staying at the main base camp and ends up in danger. The biologist is claustrophobic, the geologist is actually a mercenary hired by the diamond companies to make sure the apparent wealth of underground diamonds don't tank their companies, while he also wants to make sure no one finds any oil deposits that could harm the economy of the Middle Eastern nation he hails from. The lead soldier is there because his brother was part of the previous team that went missing.

There's a lot of attempts to add depth to the characters, or give them arcs, but it's all kind of clumsy. Ashley keeps trying to use her archaeological knowledge to help them with this new culture, and she's determined to not make a bad first impression. But every attempt backfires and she keeps having to be protected by the guys. It's caving guy Ben embracing his heritage that makes the breakthrough because he can use his mind powers to bridge the language gap.

'"You feed those monsters? No wonder there are so many of them."

"We must maintain their numbers to produce enough spoor. It is the main goal of the hunters to collect the spoor and bring it back here."

"Shit collectors," Ben said. "So much for the noble hunter image."'

Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence - Nathan Emery

As the subtitle says, it's a book at intelligence of birds. The different forms of intelligence, the ways researchers have tried to assess whether birds possess it, the ways their brains work.

Emery tends to spend a couple of pages at a time within a chapter on different aspects, or on those tests. Chapter 2, for example, is on navigation, which is a broad topic, and can be handled by different species in different ways. Emery might spend a few pages on long-distance migrations, discussing the different methods birds use, and what adaptations they've developed for the purpose.

I knew that birds could sense magnetic fields and navigate by those, although there's apparently competing theories about how they do so. I didn't know that some birds can apparently navigate by stars, although it seems to be based on which stars are visible, rather than using Polaris. If they see stars associated with the Southern Hemisphere (or perhaps just a more southerly latitude), they fly north, and vice versa.

From there, however, Emery might move to discussing the role of memory in getting food. Whether that's a hummingbird keeping track of which flowers it visited recently, so that it doesn't come back before there's more nectar, or what clues birds use to remember where they cached food and studies that were done to determine this. Then he might segue into the role the hippocampus plays in this.

The book is written in a general manner, though. Emery doesn't go into long table of figures or statistical analyses. He tends more towards quick summaries, which figures or diagrams to illustrate the point. Usually one page has text and the facing page has the visuals of what's being discussed, or just a nice picture of birds of a landscape the birds he's discussing inhabit. There is a listing of studies referenced, along with options for further reading (both of which include papers Emery was part of ) at the end, so if the reader found the curiosity piqued by a particular part, they could track down something more in-depth.

'In a classic study, two populations of blackcaps migrated in different directions; one northern European population flew southwest to winter initially in southern Spain, before moving on to equatorial Africa, whereas the other eastern European population migrated southeast toward Turkey and eventually East Africa. When birds from each population were allowed to breed, their offspring contained genes from both populations and flew due south between the migratory routes of their parents.'

Life (2017)

This is the movie about the folks on the International Space Station recovering the probe from Mars and finding evidence of, well, life. Life which proves to be highly adaptable and really dangerous. Had to laugh at the part where it's still in a petri dish, and the one biologist is waving his finger above it and commenting its curiosity outweighs its fear. Given the audience has a good idea how this is going to end, I assume we're meant to be thinking, "Right back atcha, buddy."

Also, they named the thing Calvin. How sweet, they think I'm a potential threat to all life on the planet. 

Of course the alien breaks containment, and then it's a scramble to try and kill it before it kills them. Although this is a zero-g environment, all the scrambling around tight corridors and trying to improvise solutions reminded me of Alien. They even have crappy, ineffective flamethower things! The point where the thing is outside the station, trying to climb back in through the thrusters, and they keep trying to use the thrusters to kill it, degrading their orbit, made me think of Deep Blue Sea.

I know the movie lampshades that every cell in the creature is somehow simultaneously a muscle cell, a photoreceptive cell, and a nerve cell, meaning it can be, 'all brain', but I was still unsure the thing could be as smart as it's portrayed.

The thing I thought about most during the film was that I've read somewhere that Jack Kirby thought it was a really bad idea to include that gold plate on the Voyager spacecraft detailing how to find our planet. He figured if an alien species could find us, it probably wouldn't end well for humanity. My feeling is, given how big space really is, if aliens get close enough to our Solar System to encounter Voyager, they're already likely to find us. If they have to wait for it to reach their star system, humanity is probably long extinct before they'll ever get anywhere close to us.

But the notion we really have no idea what we'll be dealing with if we do encounter intelligent life (or even life, period) from another world, and that it can very easily go badly in a hurry, that I can follow. We only have life on our own world to judge by, and we have no idea if our conditions or metabolic cycles or whatever are commonplace or an aberration.

There were a few different ways I thought the end could go. I was still hoping for a relatively happy one, eternal optimist (read: sucker) that I am, but there were at least twice as many ways I could see it ending badly, so I wasn't really surprised. And I'd seen a review of the movie at some point after it came out, so I also wasn't surprised when one of the big-name actors died early. Knowing didn't ruin the movie since it's really a horror flick. Audience goes in primed expecting most of them to die.

A Most Remarkable Creature - Jonathan Meiburg

Carcaras are a group of falcons found throughout South and Central America. They're odd, especially for a bird of prey, in that most species like to hang out in groups, and their diet is extremely broad. They're also very curious and some species, such as the striated carcaras who live on the Falkland Islands, seem very interested in humans, even after humans attempted to wipe them out (for preying on sheep), as humans do.

Meiburg ranges widely in the book, starting on the Falklands with the carcaras (or "Johnny rooks"), moving to discussion of the evolution of carcaras, why they're so different from other falcons like the peregrines which also inhabit the Falklands. Evolution means also talking about Darwin, who encountered the Johnny rooks during his voyage on the Beagle, and was fascinated by their behavior, but Meiburg discusses William Henry Hudson even more. 

Hudson grew up in the pampas of Argentina, where he was more likely to see the chimango caracaras, but they interested him as well. I read and reviewed his novel Green Mansions on here in late 2018, but he wrote several books about both birds and his childhood after he'd moved to England. Sounds like I would have enjoyed his non-fiction more. 

I think Meiburg's trying to draw a connection between Hudson's connection to nature and fond memories of his home to the intelligence of the caracaras and how they're a product of that same home. More specifically, its lengthy isolation from the Northern Hemisphere. It's what I think keeps the lengthy section of his trip up the Rewa River from feeling out of place. He does encounter some red-throated caracaras, but that's only a small part of the story. It's more closely related to the places Hudson tried to evoke in Green Mansions, of finding places yet untouched by humans.

One of the things Meiburg brings up is, despite being related to falcons, caracaras act in many ways similar to ravens and crows, which were absent in the Southern Hemisphere. Wide diet, intelligent, curious, recognize the potential in humans to provide food. He spends some time discussing Johnny rooks brought to England that were taught to solve puzzles, how they're capable of learning simply by watching other caracaras solve them. It's interesting, the way different animals fill different niches. Up north, corvids took on that role. In South America, it was caracaras. For the striated, at least in part of necessity. On an island, you can't necessarily be too picky about what you eat.

'The ones that make it to adulthood have mastered the art of finding a meal anywhere they can, and since the larder varies from island to island and season to season, successful Johnny rooks have to maintain an open mind and an ecumenical diet. They catch tiny fish in the shallows at low tide, or fill their bellies with seal shit, and some become seasonally nocturnal to hunt petrels that return to their burrows at night.'

Evolving Animals - Wallace Arthur

Sitting in airports for hours on end does offer time to read. The book is a collection of roughly 10-page essays about biology, specifically animal biology, and where we stood in 2014, when the book was written. Broadly focused on evolution, Wallace takes a sensible, textbook approach to the organization of the chapters. The first chapter is simply titled, 'What is an animal?' Obviously if you're going to discuss them, it would be helpful to define what they are. This is also a good way to establish some basic terminology about cell parts of body structures.

Wallace is writing for, I believe the layperson, or maybe a biology major just getting started. While he does occasionally get into the weeds on terminology - such as a discussion of one use of the term "recapitulation" in biology versus another - he tries to limit the use of geologic period names and larger family and class names. He doesn't avoid them entirely - I had never even heard of the Lophotrochozoa. It's a name for a group of protostomes (meaning their mouth develops before their anus, primates are in the other category) that include annelids and molluscs.

There's a lot of discussion of work done sequencing genes or embryology, using them to determine how long ago two groups branched from each other. Wallace contrasts the conclusions drawn from that evidence with past conclusions drawn when biologists didn't have DNA evidence. Under the latter, annelids were considered to be close to arthropods, because both have segmented bodies. The more recent evidence suggests roundworms (like tapeworms) are closer to arthropods.

Some parts are more interesting than others. The final chapter, attempting to discuss consciousness, how it's defined, when it might have developed, was so theoretical it didn't engage me much. I was more interested in the idea of evolutionary novelties, like a jellyfish's stinging cells or a turtle's shell, and the idea of at what level does a development cease to be a novelty? At one point in time, jaws would have been considered a novelty, but now they aren't. I wonder if opposable thumbs count?

Something I was familiar with, but still enjoyed, was the chapter on, essentially, how it's easier to lose a structure or adaptation than it is to gain it. In the book, the example is of mammals that adapted back to an aquatic life from terrestrial. While whales, seals, and manatees all returned to the sea from different lineages (whales seem like they're from the same line that produced even-toed animals like hippos, manatees maybe share ancestors with elephants, and seals are closest to bears, apparently), they developed roughly similar body types, and manatees and whales' feet turned into a flattened tail. 

But while they regained some physical traits similar to fish (ancient fish being an ancestor to mammals), none of them have regained gills. Whales and dolphins developed a blowhole, but that's a modification of their existing respiratory system. Likewise, terrestrial snails developed from aquatic ancestors. Those terrestrial snails in some cases later developed into species to live in freshwater. None of those snails have developed gills either. An aquatic animal that develops from a terrestrial one might be able to recapture some morphology, but it seems like some structures are too complicated to get back once lost. Along those lines, I would imagine there aren't going to be species of snakes in the future that regain functional legs.

If evolutionary biology is something you have interest in, the book is worth a look. Wallace will also cite other biologists' work, which might focus more extensively on something you want to explore further.

'Perhaps more complex animals require not more genes but rather more complex patterns of gene-switching. In relation to this point, it is interesting to note a recent discovery made by American biologist Kevin Peterson and his colleagues. They studied a group of tiny molecules (called mico-RNAs) involved in gene-switching, and found that more complex animals had more families of micro-RNAs.'