Death, with big nasty pointy teeth

Australia has a reputation for being the home of wildlife that pretty much all wants to kill you.

It has some of the world's most venomous (and aggressive) snakes and some of the world's most venomous (and aggressive) spiders.  There are enormous saltwater crocodiles lying in the shallows, waiting for the next stupid tourist to happen along.  In the northern part of the country, they have cassowaries, which will eliminate any doubt that birds are descended from dinosaurs.  They have "paralysis ticks" that are pretty much exactly what they sound like.  There's the most venomous creature known, the innocent-looking box jellyfish, whose toxin is one of the most poisonous naturally-occurring substances -- 0.04 milligrams per kilogram of body weight is the LD50 (dose that would kill fifty percent of the individuals exposed to it).  Most of the mammals are relatively benign, although it's worth mentioning that the iconic kangaroo has kicked people to death, mostly the stupid tourists who didn't get eaten by crocodiles earlier in this paragraph.

There's even a plant called the gympie-gympie that is basically the nettle from hell; the hairs on the leaves embed themselves in your skin, leading to excruciating pain that can last over a year.  And they have a species of grass, spinifex grass (Triodia spp.) that pulls up silica from the soil and deposits it in the needle-sharp leaf tips.  Silica, of course, is the chemical name for glass.  So walking naked through a field of spinifex grass is highly discouraged.

Australia: where even the plants want to cut a bitch.

So I suppose it shouldn't have been surprising that a recent discovery of a previously-unknown species of pterodactyloid in Australia yielded a picture of this critter that is like something out of a nightmare.  Christened Thapunngaka shawi -- the genus name comes from the indigenous Wanamara language, and means "spear mouth;" the species name is after the fossil's discoverer, Len Shaw -- the creature was described by paleontologist Tim Richard of the University of Queensland as "the closest thing we have to a real-life dragon."

This thing had a wingspan of seven meters, making it neck-and-neck with the largest pterodactyloid yet known, Quetzalcoatlus, which at least didn't have big nasty pointy teeth.  Thapunngaka, though?  C'mon.  It's from Australia.

Here's an artist's recreation of Thapunngaka:

"It was essentially just a skull with a long neck, bolted on a pair of long wings," Richard said.  "This thing would have been quite savage.  It would have cast a great shadow over some quivering little dinosaur that wouldn't have heard it until it was too late."

So that's cheerful.  The good news is that when it was alive, most of central Australia was a huge inland sea, and the last of them died out something on the order of 92 million years ago.

It's an open question why Australia is the home of so many dangerous life forms.  I have to wonder if it's not some kind of evolutionary arms race; when one species evolves a toxin (or other dangerous feature), the other species in the area are highly selected for any genetic variations that allow them to become (1) resistant, and (2) more dangerous themselves.  Each improvement (so to speak) in one species leads to pressure to improve in the other species, until you finally have a faunal and floral assemblage that makes Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors seem positively friendly by comparison.

In any case, it's interesting that this has been going on since prehistoric times.  I guess it's not surprising, really; such a scary bunch of wildlife doesn't just evolve overnight.  I have friends in Australia who have assured me that the danger is over-hyped and that they haven't had any bad encounters, so i suppose it shouldn't discourage me from visiting.  At least I have the comfort of knowing that all I have to avoid are the spiders and snakes and ticks and jellyfish and crocodiles and cassowaries and various native plants; at least I don't have to worry about getting speared by a seven-meter-wingspan aerial death machine.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is by an author we've seen here before: the incomparable Jenny Lawson, whose Twitter @TheBloggess is an absolute must-follow.  She blogs and writes on a variety of topics, and a lot of it is screamingly funny, but some of her best writing is her heartfelt discussion of her various physical and mental issues, the latter of which include depression and crippling anxiety.

Regular readers know I've struggled with these two awful conditions my entire life, and right now they're manageable (instead of completely controlling me 24/7 like they used to do).  Still, they wax and wane, for no particularly obvious reason, and I've come to realize that I can try to minimize their effect but I'll never be totally free of them.

Lawson's new book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way) is very much in the spirit of her first two, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy.  Poignant and hysterically funny, she can have you laughing and crying on the same page.  Sometimes in the same damn paragraph.  It's wonderful stuff, and if you or someone you love suffers from anxiety or depression or both, read this book.  Seeing someone approaching these debilitating conditions with such intelligence and wit is heartening, not least because it says loud and clear: we are not alone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

What the cat dragged in

One thing I try to keep in mind when I'm reading something controversial is the fact that all humans have biases, including me.  And sometimes these biases are so powerful that they become blind spots -- something we believe so strongly that we flatly refuse even to consider any evidence to the contrary.

And when you tie in powerful emotions to these blind spots, people become so immovable in their convictions that trying to change their minds is damn near impossible.

One rather unexpected case of such a blind spot surfaces periodically on a listserv I belong to.  As some of you may know, I'm a rather rabid birder, and have been known to stand in the freezing cold for hours or trek through a leech-infested steam bath of a southeast Asian jungle just in order to see birds I've never seen before.  So I belong to a listserv called "BirdChat," so I can connect with other similarly-obsessed and dubiously-sane people around the world.  And every once in a while, someone will bring up the topic of...

... cats.

When you bring up cats -- more specifically, outdoor cats -- you immediately sort the birding world into two groups.  The first has a mortal hatred of outdoor cats, and considers their toll on bird populations to be ridiculously high.  The second, which consists almost entirely of people who own cats that are allowed outdoors, dismisses those contentions as nonsense.

[image courtesy of Mark Marek Photography and the Wikimedia Commons]

And the battle escalates quickly.  Usually someone brings up the Stephen's Island Wren, a little flightless bird that lived only on one island near New Zealand, and which was exterminated by the islanders' pet cats.  Someone else will counter that we're not talking about small islands, here, that allowing Mr. Fluffums to catch a sparrow or two every once in a while is just allowing him to express his natural hunting instincts, and isn't hurting anything.  Some hothead will then propose turning loose coyotes near Mr. Fluffums' stomping grounds, and seeing how his owners will feel about "natural hunting instincts" then.  Tempers rise, unsourced facts and statistics are thrown around, and no one gives an inch.  Usually a moderator will have to step in and say, "You people need to stop this right now," and everyone will return, grumbling, to their respective corners, until the next time the subject comes up.

So at the risk of setting off a firestorm here, how 'bout we look at an actual peer-reviewed study regarding the subject?  Can it be true that outdoor cats are a problem, or are we looking at people who take bird conservation way, way too seriously?

Scott Loss, Tom Will, and Peter Marra wrote an article for Nature about two years ago that settles the issue, fact-wise, once and for all.  Called "The Impact of Free-Ranging Cats on Wildlife in the United States," it describes a "systematic review and [quantitative] estimate [of] mortality caused by cats," and came up with the following staggering statistics:

We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually... Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.

That's "billion" with a "b," folks.  And focus especially on the last sentence; cats are the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for American birds.  More than legal and illegal hunting; more than pesticides; more than collisions with automobiles, wind turbines, and airplanes.

In fact, more than all of those put together.

About the study, Dr. George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy, said:

The very high credibility of this study should finally put to rest the misguided notions that outdoor cats represent some harmless, new component to the natural environment.  The carnage that outdoor cats inflict is staggering and can no longer be ignored or dismissed.  This is a wake-up call for cat owners and communities to get serious about this problem before even more ecological damage occurs.

Pretty unequivocal, you'd think.  But the response from cat owners has largely been: silence.

The reason I bring all of this up is a conversation I had a couple of days ago with someone who was troubled because she has a bird feeder, and also an outdoor cat.  So she is, in effect, luring in birds so the cat can kill them.  Is there anything, she asked, that she can do to keep the cat from killing the birds in her yard?

I said, "Keep the cat indoors."

She looked dubious.  "But... I don't want to do that."

I gave her an incredulous look.  "Then you shouldn't have a bird feeder."

"I don't want to do that, either.  I like the birds."

"Then keep the damn cat indoors."

Having seen the firestorms that have erupted on the BirdChat listserv, I let the topic drop.  Because when you tie in biases and preconceived notions with the emotions -- especially about something as emotionally-laden as pet ownership -- things can escalate really quickly.

The data is out there.  Let me reiterate: outdoor cats are the single worst cause of bird mortality in the United States (and, I believe, in Great Britain as well).  So if you care about wildlife, the only responsible thing to do is to keep your cats inside.

But I have to wonder how many minds this will change.  On topics like this, it's far easier to frown, say, "Oh, but this can't really be about my cat," and go on doing what you've done before.  I hope I'm wrong, mind you, because this is one topic on which the jury has weighed in, and the verdict is unarguable.

But as we've seen all too many times before, changing people's minds when they've already decided what they believe is often a losing battle.  Sometimes the attitude is "evidence be damned, I'll do what I like."