The wheel of light

I absolutely love the fact that there are real phenomena that science hasn't yet explained.

It's not just from the standpoint of "scientists will always have a job," although that's part of it.  I'm also captivated by that sense of wonder I had as a child, contemplating something I'd noticed or heard about, and thinking, "Wow... I wonder how that works?"

A good example is something I first ran into a long time ago, from the delightful collection Strangely Enough! by C. B. Colby.  This book is a compendium of two-to-three page descriptions of what can probably best be described as Forteana -- odd or anomalous phenomena of various types.  Some are humorous; some are stories of hauntings, cryptids, and UFOs; a few are clearly in the realm of the tall tale.  (One that straddles the line between all of them is the scary story called "Whistle," about a elderly woman living with her dog in a small house in the hill country who hears a distant whistling noise, which gradually gets closer and closer.  It's terrifying in its subtlety and suggestiveness.  It was made into a seven-minute short film in 2008 by Eric Walter and Jon Parke which is well worth watching, preferably not when you're alone at night.)

One of the stories in Strangely Enough! that caught my eye when I first read it as a teenager was about a peculiar marine phenomenon that turns out to be absolutely real -- and still unexplained (although there is one possible explanation I'll get to).  It's nicknamed "Poseidon's wheel," and is most commonly seen at night in the Indian Ocean and tropical south Pacific, although it's been observed elsewhere multiple times.  Sailors report a giant, glowing wheel, with radial spokes like a wagon wheel, slowly rotating underwater.  

Here's the account in Colby's book, about an instance of the phenomenon observed from the Danish ship Bintang, in June of 1909 in the Straits of Malacca:

As the Bintang was steaming through the night in the Straits of Malacca, between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the captain was astonished to see what appeared to be a long beam of light under the water.  Like the beam of a searchlight, it seemed to be sweeping across the floor of the sea.  The beam passed across the sea before him and was followed by another and then another, like the revolving spokes of a wheel, or searchlight beams following one another across the sky.

Soon, some distance from the ship, there appeared a brighter spot or hub, from which the long beams of underwater light seemed to stem.  The beam revolved slowly as the rotating "wheel" slowly approached the Bintang.  In the words of the captain, "Long arms issued from a center around which the whole system appeared to rotate."

The great revolving wheel was so huge that only half of it could be seen above the horizon.  As it revolved toward the Bintang, the crew stared in dumbfounded amazement.  Looking around, they realized that the long arms of light could not possibly be a reflection of their own lights, and there was no other ship in sight.

As the great silent revolving wheel of underwater light came nearer, it seemed to sink lower into the water and grow dimmer and dimmer.  Finally it vanished deep beneath the waves and the Straits of Malacca were once more black and empty.

It'd be tempting to dismiss this as falling into the "tall tale" category, but the Bintang is hardly the only ship whose crew reports seeing Poseidon's wheel.  Here's one of the best-documented accounts, from U. S. Naval Commander J. R. Bodler in 1952 (edited for length; you can read the entire account at the link provided):

My vessel had passed through the Strait of Hormuz, bound for India.  Little Quoin Island Light was still in sight on the starboard quarter, bearing 305° T, distance 20 miles.  The night was bright and clear, with very good visibility, no Moon.  The Third Mate called me to the bridge, saying that he had observed something he thought I should see.

About four points on the port bow, toward the coast of Iran, there was a luminous band which seemed to pulsate.  Its appearance suggested the aurora borealis, but much lower; in fact on or below the horizon.  Examination with binoculars showed that the luminous area was definitely below the horizon, in the water, and drawing nearer to the vessel.  With the approach of this phenomenon it became apparent that the pulsations seemed to start in the center of the band and flow outward towards its extremities.

At a distance of about a mile from the ship, it was apparent that the disturbance was roughly circular in shape, about 1000 to 1500 feet in diameter.  The pulsations could now be seen to be caused by a revolving motion of the entire pattern about a rather ill-defined center; with streaks of light like the beams of search-lights, radiating outward from the center and revolving (in a counterclockwise direction) like the spokes of a gigantic wheel.

For several minutes the vessel occupied the approximate center of the phenomenon.  Slightly curved bands of light crossed the bow, passed rapidly down the port side from bow to stern, and up the starboard side from aft, forward.  The luminosity was sufficient to make portions of the vessels upper work’s quite visible.  The bands of luminance seemed to pass a given point at about half-second intervals.  As may well be imagined, the effect was weird and impressive in the extreme; with the vessel seeming to occupy the center of a huge pinwheel whose “spokes” consisted of phosphorescent luminance revolving rapidly about the vessel as a hub...

The central “hub” of the phenomenon drew gradually to starboard, and passed aft; becoming more and more distant on the starboard quarter.  While it was still in sight, several miles astern, and appearing, by this time, as a pulsating band of light, a repetition of the same manifestation appeared fine on the starboard bow.  This was slightly smaller in area than the first, and a trifle less brilliant.  Its center passed slowly aft on the starboard side, with the pattern of revolving, luminous “spokes” clearly defined...

It is the present writer’s conviction that he has been privileged to witness one of the rare instances of a most curious and impressive natural phenomenon.  If other seafarers have had a similar experience, or anyone of scientific bent can offer an explanation of the foregoing, he would be most interested to learn more on the subject.

This phenomenon has been seen dozens of times, and described and sketched by crew members -- but to my knowledge, never successfully photographed.  Of course, paranormal "explanations" abound, including underwater alien craft (USOs?  Unidentified Swimming Objects?  I dunno).  But the most reasonable explanation I've heard has to do with a microscopic life form called a dinoflagellate.

Dinoflagellates are single-celled plankton, mostly marine.  They are nearly all harmless, although a few, like the species Karenia brevis, produce toxins -- Karenia is the one responsible for "red tide."  A couple, like the rather horrifying parasite Pfiesteria, are pathogenic.  

One group of dinoflagellates does something remarkable, though.  They're bioluminescent -- capable of using chemical reactions to produce light.  The evolutionary purpose is uncertain; it's hard to imagine what they gain by it.  But when there are enough of them present, the result is rather spectacular.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Hans Hillewaert, Noctiluca scintillans, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What's relevant here -- besides the obvious bit that we have something underwater producing light -- is that bioluminescent dinoflagellates like Noctiluca produce light when the water is agitated.  When there's a bloom of Noctiluca, every wave crashing on the beach appears to sparkle -- a truly breathtaking sight.

Recall that the two sightings mentioned above, and as far as I know, all of the other accounts of the phenomenon, occurred from the decks of engine-propelled ships.  Ship engines produce a lot of noise, and some of it is subsonic -- large-wavelength, low-frequency compression waves radiating out from the belly of the ship.

As those compressional waves move through the water, perhaps that agitation is triggering light from the local population of bioluminescent dinoflagellates.  The "spoke" pattern could be explained by this; it might be that there's a standing wave being created, and the regularly spaced nodes and antinodes of the underwater sound waves correspond to (respectively) the dark and light bands.

One thing this doesn't explain, however -- at least not as far as I can see -- is that in most of the eyewitness accounts, the hub of the wheel appeared to be stationary, and the ship approached and then passed it.  If the source of the disturbance creating the light was the ship itself, you'd think the pattern would be centered on the ship, and then would travel with it (at least as long as it was in water containing the microorganisms).

So Poseidon's wheel remains a mystery, and the scientific explanation very much only a working hypothesis.

It's an intriguing phenomenon.  It's been documented far too many times to be an outright hoax or misrepresentation; and many of the people describing it fall into category of "credible witness with no particular reason to lie."  So at this point, we still don't know what's going on. 

But like I said, that's part of the fun of science.  We don't understand everything, not by a longshot.  There's still plenty to look at and wonder about.  And if you're ever sailing through the tropics, keep an eye out.  You might see a vast, glowing underwater wheel, rotating slowly -- and witness one of the weirdest unexplained phenomena I've ever heard about.

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The barrage

At the last Tompkins County Friends of the Library Used Book Sale, I picked up a copy of Donald Yeomans's fascinating book titled Near-Earth Objects (which has the rather alarming subtitle, Finding Them Before They Find Us).  Yeomans has impeccable credentials -- senior fellow with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, manager/supervisor of the Near-Earth Object Program Office and Solar System Dynamics Group, and researcher with the Deep Impact Project that investigates the composition, origins, and trajectories of comets.  His book is about the potential for a significant asteroid or comet strike on Earth -- and, more importantly, how we might find potentially hazardous orbiting objects soon enough to have a chance to avert the collision.

As Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield put it, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program."

One of the topics in Yeomans's book is the history of impacts, including the famous one that ended the Mesozoic Era.  But his timeline goes back a great deal further than that; one of the sections is devoted to a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment -- on the order of four billion years ago -- during which it is thought that the Earth got absolutely pummeled.

What caused this barrage?  Well, first of all, it must be stated that not all scientists even think it happened.  The geological processes on the Earth's surface have erased most of the evidence.  Studies of cratering on the Moon (which presumably would also have gotten clobbered during the same period) have yielded conflicting results; Patrick Boehnke and Mark Harrison, of the University of California, wrote a paper back in 2016 suggesting that the radioisotope dating of rocks from the Moon supported a uniformly decreasing impact rate over its history (i.e., no sudden spike about four billion years ago).

Other researchers disagree.  Three of the largest impact basins on the Moon, the Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatis, and Mare Nectaris, all appear to date from right around the time of the hypothesized bombardment.  If the same happened on Earth, it was cataclysmic -- turning large areas of the Earth's crust into molten lava, and vaporizing huge volumes of water in the early oceans.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA, from https://ancient-life-and-history-earth.fandom.com/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment]

Where it gets interesting is the explanation for why the Late Heavy Bombardment happened -- if it did.  The whole thing hinges on a bit of physics that falls into the "stuff that I theoretically knew, but never really thought about" department.

The orbital path of a planet (or asteroid, or comet, or whatever) remains stable as long as nothing adds or removes energy from it.  If something subtracts energy, the orbit becomes smaller; if something adds energy, the orbit gets bigger.  Enough added energy, and it achieves escape velocity and is ejected from the system altogether.  But what would itself have enough energy to interact with something the size of a planet in such a way as to make any difference?

Back in the early history of the Solar System, there was a clutter of debris left over from its formation.  We still have three major bands of it left -- the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune, and the Oort Cloud way out past the orbit of Pluto.  There are few asteroids left in the vicinity of the planets, because any that were there were swept up gravitationally.  In fact, that's one of the requirements for an object to be classified as a planet; that it clear the space near it of asteroids.  (This is the characteristic that caused Pluto to get demoted.)

But four billion years ago, there was a great deal more debris around.  Any large-ish asteroids that got near a planet resulted in their giving a gravitational yank on each other; if the asteroid was ahead of the planet, it had a bit of its energy stolen by the planet (making the planet's orbital axis get bigger); if it passed behind the planet, the reverse happened (making the planet's orbital axis shrink).  Well, according to the models described by Yeomans, eventually the pushing and pulling by all of the asteroids added up, and a curious thing happened.

The two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, had their orbits altered until they were in a highly stable configuration called a 2:1 orbital resonance.  

What this means is that they were in a pattern where Saturn's orbital period was exactly twice Jupiter's.  (They're still close to that; Saturn orbits the Sun once every 29.4 years, and Jupiter once every 11.9 years.)  But when they were in perfect 2:1 resonance, they reinforced each other's gravitational influence on the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune, giving them a kick every time they lined up -- a little like a kid on a playground swing kicking off every time they pass the ground.

This did two things.  First, it gave energy to Uranus and Neptune, making their orbits bigger, moving them outwards.  Second, it subtracted energy from Jupiter and Saturn, making their orbits smaller (and eventually destroying the resonance).  But the important one here is Neptune, because the increase of its orbit moved it out into a region of space that hadn't been cleared of debris.  When Neptune slipped outward into the inner Kuiper Belt, around four billion years ago, this had the effect of slingshotting a great deal of that debris into the inner Solar System...

... turning Earth into a gigantic bullseye for meteor strikes.

So it's fascinating that if the Late Heavy Bombardment actually did occur, there's a good model for what might have caused it.

The good news is that now that Jupiter and Saturn are no longer in resonance, Neptune is more or less staying put, so any further target practice is unlikely.  Doesn't mean we're out of the woods completely, of course.  Yeomans's whole book is about the possibility of asteroid strikes.

But at least it looks like the barrage is a thing of the past.

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Empowering lunacy

The whole "they're weird" thing seems to be getting under the Republicans' skin.

J. D. Vance took the opportunity in an interview with Dana Bash a couple of days ago to object to the characterization, saying the whole thing is happening only because Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are "uncomfortable with their policy positions."

"They’re name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better," said Vance, whose running mate didn't comment because he was too busy shaking his fist and shouting at Crazy Kambala, Sleepy Joe, Cryin' Chuck Schumer, Gavin Newscum, Shifty Adam Schiff, Deranged Jack Smith, Crooked Hillary, and Pocahontas.

The thing is, a great many of the most fervent Trump supporters are weird.  Dangerously so.  Take two just from the past week, which are good examples but hardly the only ones. The first is from the program Flashpoint on wildly popular evangelical Christian Kenneth Copeland's Victory Channel.  Copeland has been a consistent and vocal supporter of Donald Trump, which still strikes me as bizarre given that Trump's main claim to fame is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in a single person.  But if you think that's strange, the pronouncement made by "Prophet Joseph Z" on Flashpoint a few days ago is more peculiar still.

In fact, Joseph Z seems to be so far from reality that he would not be able to see it even if you handed him a powerful telescope.

Here's what Joseph Z said about vice presidential nominee Tim Walz:

I believe very clearly the spirit of the Lord is making a way for the body of Christ to go through in this time.  And you know even when we bring up guys like Tim Walz and look at what’s going on, people say he’s you know midwestern folksy, I have another word for him, being from Minnesota myself, and it’s weird.  The guy’s just weird.  You see the way he hugs his wife.  You see the way he does everything.  I believe the Spirit of the Lord is letting them overextend their reach.  I believe he’s giving them a sense of confidence that’s actually going to be a surprise silver lining turnaround in this whole narrative.  I believe the spirit of the Lord is going to bring victory and breakthrough.  And you know it’s interesting how the spirit of Antichrist just loves to pick these people that fit right in with the wicked overlord lizard mafia that is really driven by their goblin masters, and when you’re looking at this, I believe that’s exactly what we’re facing right now—a spirit of Antichrist that wants to have its way.

Sure!  Of course!  Goblin masters and the lizard mafia!  But Tim Walz is the weird one, we promise!

You would think that after something like that, the moderator would have realized that it sounded like lunacy ('cuz it is), and would have been at least a little embarrassed, or inclined to backpedal on what had just been said in order to reassure listeners.

You would be wrong.

Instead, the moderator, Gene Bailey, vouched for Joseph Z's credibility, and said "we take what we put on the air very seriously."  Not a hint of "... but this dude is nuttier than squirrel shit."

The second one revolves around Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025 and author of Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, both of which should scare the absolute hell out of everyone who's not to the right of Attila the Hun.  The Trump campaign has finally acknowledged that Roberts and Project 2025 are dangerously extreme ('cuz they are), and have tried to distance themselves from it -- with Trump saying publicly that he had no idea who put the plan together, despite the fact that 140 of the collaborators on the project worked for his administration, and six were Cabinet members. 

Of course, he also swore that he had never met Roberts in his life:

So maybe trusting anything Trump says is not such a hot idea.

To say the content of Dawn's Early Light is one long paean to paranoid fascism is, if anything, an understatement.  America is in peril, Roberts says, because of "pantsuited girlboss advertising executives, Skittle-haired they/them activists, soy-faced pajama-clad work-from-home HR apparatchiks, Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, nasally-voiced Ivy League regulatory lawyers, obese George Soros-funded police abolitionist district attorneys, [and] hipster trust fund socialists."  He decries what he perceives as the loss of Christian hegemony in the United States (despite the fact that around seventy percent of Americans still self-identify as Christian, and in some parts of the country it's damn near impossible to get elected unless you do).  Mankind, he says, "is made to worship, and our republic depends on the moral strength and habits of heart brought about by piety."  Before you get your hopes up that he might be including other religions in this assessment, it's explicitly stated that he's not talking about just any kind of piety, but a specific one.  "American society is rooted in the Christian faith," he writes.  "Certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of 'religious freedom' or 'diversity, equity, and inclusion.'"

You're free to worship as you choose, apparently, but you damn well better choose right.

How will he and his cronies accomplish all of this?  Well, he's going to start with destroying "every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy."

This stuff is so extreme that I feel obliged to state for the record that I didn't make up any of these quotes.  (If you're curious, he apparently singled out the Loudoun County Public Schools because of a rape case that he says was committed by a male student dressing like a female to access a girl's bathroom -- a claim that was not substantiated at the hearing.)

Now, don't @ me about how you're a Republican and you don't agree with this stuff.  I'm sure that's true.  I have conservative-leaning friends who probably would say the same.  However, in this election, you need to realize that if you vote Republican you are empowering and legitimizing the people who do believe all of this, and who if elected will do their damndest to make sure it's all set in place.  

The fact that there are people who have a conservative approach to governance doesn't bother me in the slightest; we may disagree, but we can discuss it civilly.  But there is no discussion with people like Kenneth Copeland, Gene Bailey, and Kevin Roberts.  They don't want to work with the opposition and come to consensus.

They want the opposition eradicated -- violently, if necessary.

I usually don't frame things so starkly, but this November we have a choice.  One side of the ticket has inextricably allied itself with the extreme right-wing lunatic fringe, which is comfortable talking about the Antichrist's lizard mafia and Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, and act as if what they're saying is completely rational.  The fact that "some members of the GOP don't believe this" is actually irrelevant, because they're not the ones who are going to come out on top if Donald Trump wins.

This fall we have a choice between sense and nonsense, between empowering reasonable policy and empowering lunacy.  Whatever party you belong to, whatever your political leanings, there's nothing more to it than that.

I know which way I'm voting.

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All the lonely people

I'm a big fan of the band OneRepublic, but I don't think any of their songs has struck me like their 2018 hit "Connection."

"There's so many people here to be so damn lonely."  Yeah, brother, I feel that hard.  This whole culture has fostered disconnection -- or, more accurately, bogus connections.  Social media gives you the appearance of authentic interaction, but the truth is what you see is chosen for you by an algorithm that often has little to do with what (or whom) you're actually interested in.  A host of studies has documented the correlation between frequent social media use and poor mental health, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem -- but as usual, the causation could run either way.  Rather than social media causing the decline in emotional wellness, it could be that people who are already experiencing depression gravitate toward social media because they lack meaningful real-life connections -- and at least the interactions on Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and whatnot are better than nothing.

Whichever way it goes, it appears that social media, which has long billed itself as being the new way to make friends, has left a great many people feeling more isolated than ever.

I know that's true for me.  I'm pretty shy, and don't get out much.  I volunteer sorting books for our local Friends of the Library book sale once a week; I see my athletic trainer once a week; I have a friend with whom I go for walks on Saturday mornings.  That's about it.  My social calendar is more or less non-existent.  And despite my natural tendency toward introversion, it's not a good thing.  I've had the sense -- undoubtedly inaccurate, but that doesn't make it feel any less real -- that if I were to vanish from the face of the Earth, maybe a dozen people would notice, and half that would care.

It's a hell of a way to live.

Sadly, I'm far from the only person who feels this way.  Disconnection and isolation are endemic in our society, and the scary part is the toll it takes.  Not only are there the obvious connections to mental health issues like depression and anxiety, a study out of Oregon State University published this week in the Journal of Psychology found that chronic loneliness is connected to a slew of other problems -- including poor sleep, nightmares, heart disease, stroke, dementia, and premature death.  The study, which involved 1,600 adults between the ages of eighteen and eighty, was absolutely unequivocal.

"Interpersonal relationships are very much a core human need," said psychologist Colin Hesse, director of the School of Communication in OSU’s College of Liberal Arts, who led the study.  "When people’s need for strong relationships goes unmet, they suffer physically, mentally and socially.  Just like hunger or fatigue means you haven’t gotten enough calories or sleep, loneliness has evolved to alert individuals when their needs for interpersonal connection are going unfulfilled...  Quality restorative sleep is a linchpin for cognitive functioning, mood regulation, metabolism and many other aspects of well-being.  That’s why it’s so critical to investigate the psychological states that disrupt sleep, loneliness being key among them."

The open question is what to do about it.  Social media clearly isn't the answer.  I don't want to paint it all as negative; I have good interactions on social media, and it allows me to keep in touch with friends who live too far away to see regularly, which is why I'm willing to participate in it at all.  But to have those interactions requires wading through all of the other stuff the algorithm desperately wants me to see (including what appear to be eighteen gazillion "sponsored posts," i.e., advertisements).  The bottom line is that people like Mark Zuckerberg and the other CEOs of large social media organizations don't give a flying rat's ass about my feelings; it's all about making money.  If it makes MZ money, you can bet you'll see it lots.  If it doesn't?

Meh.  Maybe.  Probably not.  Certainly you shouldn't count on it.

So the alternative is to try to get out there more and form some authentic connections, which is much easier said than done.  All I know is that it's important.  There may be people in this world who are natural loners, but I suspect they're few and far between.  The majority of us need deep connection with friends, and suffer if we don't have it.

And the Hesse et al. study has shown that there's more at risk than just your mood if you don't.

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Grieving

I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have had one or more dogs or cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a mouse he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt.  Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Is my puppy's wagging tail when I talk to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knows will get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that forty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  I have several times gone through the inevitable tragedy of losing beloved pets, and what has struck me each time is not only how I and my wife have reacted, but how our other animals have.  Most recently, when our sweet, quirky little one-eyed Shiba Inu, Cleo, somehow got out of our fence and was hit and killed by a passing car, our big old pit bull Guinness went into a positive decline.

It was unexpected in a way, because Cleo and Guinness didn't really interact all that much; they kind of didn't speak the same language.  Cleo, typical of her breed, was independent, curious, and eccentric; Guinness is strongly bonded to us (especially my wife, whom he follows around like a shadow), protective, and thinks that chasing a tennis ball is the most fun hobby ever.  But when Cleo died, Guinness went into a prolonged period of grief that nearly matched our own.

Recent experiments have shown that the neurochemical underpinning of emotions in our brain are shared by dogs and cats -- they experience a surge of oxytocin when they see their friends (whether human or not) just like we do.  When I go out to get the mail and come back inside under a minute later, and my puppy Jethro greets me as if he thought I'd abandoned him forever and ever and OMIGOD I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE BACK, he really is experiencing something like the rush we feel when seeing someone we dearly love.

Of course, he does like belly rubs, too.

If you needed one more piece of evidence of the falsehood of my long-ago professor's contention that non-human animals don't experience emotion, it came out this week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.  A study of pet cats -- an animal widely considered to be independent and self-sufficient -- experience genuine grief when a family member dies, even if that family member is another pet...

... and even when it's a dog.

The study analyzed the behavior of 450 cats that had gone through loss, and the results were widely consistent -- grieving cats slept and ate less, vocalized more, hid more, refused to play but became clingy, and appeared to look for their lost friend.  "Unlike dogs, we tend to think that cats are aloof and not social," said Jennifer Vonk, a comparative/cognitive psychologist at Oakland University and a co-author of the work.  "They may not form packs like wild dogs, but in the wild, cats still tend to band together and form hierarchies...  I think we’ve been mischaracterizing them."

The divide between ourselves and our pets -- and by extension, between us and the rest of the natural world -- is far narrower than many of us think.  A lot of pet owners say "he understands every word I say" (I've been guilty of that myself), which is certainly untrue, but the emotional resonance between pets and the rest of the members of their household is undeniable.  And grief is experienced deeply by a great many more species than ourselves.

But y'all'll have to excuse me.  Jethro is looking at me with his big, soulful brown eyes.  He hasn't lost a friend or anything, but probably would like a belly rub.

Gotta keep my priorities straight.

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Since this post is pet-related, I thought it was a good opportunity to put in a plug for our Third Annual Pandemic Pottery Sale.  My wife and I are both amateur potters, so we tend to get overrun with pottery we don't have space for.  Two years ago, we came up with the idea of selling a bunch of it and donating the proceeds to charity.  This year the recipient we chose is the fabulous Stay Wild Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (where we got our two wonderful rescue dogs Jethro and Rosie).  They do fantastic work and are constantly dealing with costly animal care and bringing dogs and cats from states with kill shelters (Jethro came from Georgia, Rosie from Texas), which is crazy expensive.

The way it works is if you see a piece you like, you make a bid on it.  If no one else bids, it's yours.  If there are competing bids, the high one gets the piece.  A few provisos: first, the shipping costs outside of the United States are prohibitively expensive -- so unfortunately, this event is limited to our American friends.  Second, all of the pieces EXCEPT AS MARKED are food safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe.  However: we work with stoneware clay, which is not completely vitrified even when glazed and fired properly, so if you're using a piece to hold water long-term (mostly this caution is for vases) make sure to put something underneath it so you don't ruin nice furniture.  (Many of them won't leak, but don't take the chance.)

Once most of the pieces are claimed, we'll present Jane George, who runs Stay Wild, with what will hopefully be a big check!

So check out the website, take a look at the gallery, and bid on what takes your fancy!  Feel free to pass the link along to interested friends.  Enjoy!

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Birds of a feather

The diversity you find among birds is really remarkable.

There are differences in bill shape, from the weird angled beaks of flamingos, to the longer-on-the-bottom fish skewers of skimmers, to the upswept needle of the avocet, to the absurd (and aptly-named) spoonbills and shoebills, to the pelicans -- about whom my dad taught me a limerick when I was little:

A wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his bellican.
He can stash in his beak
All his food for the week,
But I really don't see how the hellican.

Yeah, it's kind of obvious where I got my sense of humor from.

Of course, it doesn't end there. The impossibly long toes of the South American jacanas (called "lilytrotters" because they can walk on the floating leaves of waterlilies).  The phenomenal wingspan of the albatross.  The insane plumage of the birds-of-paradise.

And the colors.  Man, the colors!  Even in my decidedly non-tropical home we have some pretty amazing birds.  The first time I saw an Indigo Bunting, I was certain that one of my sons had put a blue plastic bird on the bird feeder just to rattle my chain.  There couldn't be a real bird that was that fluorescent shade of cobalt.

Then... it moved.

But nothing prepared me for the colors I saw on my visits to Ecuador, especially amongst the birds of the tanager family.  There are hundreds of species of tanagers in that tiny little country, and because they often travel in mixed foraging flocks, you can sometimes see twenty or thirty different species in the same tree.  These include the Green-headed Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lars Falkdalen Lindahl (User:Njaelkies Lea), Green-headed Tanager Ubatuba, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Black-capped Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Black-capped Tanager JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And the Flame-faced Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eleanor Briccetti, Flame-faced Tanager (4851596008), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Being a biologist, of course the question of how these birds evolved such extravagant colors is bound to come up, and my assumption was always that it was sexual selection -- the females choosing the most brightly-colored males as mates (in this group, as with many bird species, the males are usually vividly decked out and the females are drab-colored). If over time, the showiest males are the most likely to get lucky, then you get sexual dimorphism -- the evolution of different outward appearances between males and females.  (This isn't always so, by the way.  Most species of sparrows, for example, have little sexual dimorphism, and even experienced birders can't tell a male from a female sparrow by looking.)  More puzzling still is the general trend that tropical birds are more brilliantly-colored than bird species in higher latitudes -- a trend that is yet to be convincingly explained.

The reason this comes up today is two papers that came out last week.  The first, that appeared in Science Advances, looks at one of the most amazing things about their evolutionary history -- they were the only branch of the dinosaur clade that survived the cataclysmic mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  What allowed birds to make it through the bottleneck that killed all of their near relatives -- and not only survive, but thrive and rediversify?

The evidence is that the extinction event selected for two things; small body size, and a shift toward young being altricial -- born relatively helpless and undeveloped, and therefore requiring more parental care.  Some lineages of birds would eventually increase in body size again, but they never again would reach the colossal proportions that their cousins did during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods.

"We have typically not looked at the change in DNA composition and model across the tree of life as a change that something interesting has happened at a particular point of time and place," said Stephen Smith, of the University of Michigan, who co-authored the study.  "This study illustrates that we have probably been missing something...  We found that adult body size and patterns of pre-hatching development are two important features of bird biology we can link to the genetic changes we’re detecting.  One of the most significant challenges in evolutionary biology and ornithology is teasing out the relationships between major bird groups — it’s difficult to determine the structure of the tree of life for living birds."

The study not only elucidated relationships between extant groups of birds, it allowed the researchers to pinpoint when groups diverged from each other, and therefore what innovations were likely to be connected with events occurring on the Earth at the time.

The second study, which appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution, looked at the question I began with -- the impossibly bright colors that are characteristic of so many bird species.  Colors in birds arise two ways -- pigments (chemicals which absorb some frequencies of light and reflect others) and structural color (due to feathers creating a combination of refraction and interference; this is also known as iridescence).  Most pigmented color in birds is relatively drab -- blacks, grays, and various shades of brown -- the flashing blues, greens, and purples you see in groups like tanagers, hummingbirds, and sunbirds are almost entirely due to iridescence.

The researchers went through images of as many of the 9,409 species of birds currently in existence, along with the current best iteration of the family tree of birds, to try and figure out where along the way iridescence evolved, and how it spread so widely among this class of animals.  

And what they found was that 415 distantly-related branches of the tree have iridescent feathers, and the common ancestor of all modern birds -- something like eighty million years ago -- was very likely iridescent.

"I was very excited to learn that the ancestral state of all birds is iridescence," said Chad Eliason, of the Field Museum in Chicago, who was the paper's lead author.  "We've found fossil evidence of iridescent birds and other feathered dinosaurs before, by examining fossil feathers and the preserved pigment-producing structures in those feathers.  So we know that iridescent feathers existed back in the Cretaceous -- those fossils help support the idea from our model that the ancestor of all modern birds was iridescent too."

There are still a lot of questions left unanswered, however.  "We still don't know why iridescence evolved in the first place," Eliason said.  "Iridescent feathers can be used by birds to attract mates, but iridescence is related to other aspects of birds' lives too.  For instance, tree swallows change color when the humidity changes, so iridescence could be related to the environment, or it might be related to another physical property of feathers, like water resistance.  But knowing more about how there came to be so many iridescent birds in the tropics might help us understand why iridescence evolved."

Which is extremely cool.  Something to think about next time you see one of those brilliant little flying jewels flit by.  The stunning colors we appreciate every day on our bird feeders and in the wild have a very long history -- going back to a trait that evolved something like eighty million years ago.

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Ghostsquatch

At the end of yesterday's mashup of alien invasions and giant superintelligent (and malevolent) bugs, I wrote that I couldn't guess what might be the next bizarre woo-woo hybrid, but speculated that it might be ghost Bigfoots.  I picked that largely because it sounded ridiculous.

As of this writing I have now been emailed three times by loyal readers of Skeptophilia that yes, there are people who believe in spectral Sasquatches.

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the cryptid world that the Ghost Bigfoot Theory became more than just a fever dream of mine because of Nick Redfern, author of Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, Three Men Seeking Monsters, and about a dozen other titles on similar topics.

But to set the stage, a bit of explanation.  You almost certainly know all about such familiar cryptids as Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, and Champ, and if you're a regular reader of this blog you likely also have a good working knowledge of some less familiar ones -- the Bunyip, Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, LizardMan, Sheepsquatch, the Beast of Gévaudan, Black Shuck, and Cadborosaurus.  You are probably also well aware that there has never been a bit of hard evidence for the existence of any of them.  All we have is sketchy eyewitness accounts, grainy photographs, and videocamera footage so shaky it looks like it was taken by a person who had just consumed about a quart of espresso.

What explains this dearth of tangible proof for any of these mysterious creatures?  There are two possible explanations that come readily to mind:

1. None of them actually exist.
2. The eyewitness accounts, photographs, and video clips aren't of actual, live cryptids; what people are seeing are the ghosts of prehistoric animals.

Well. I think we can all agree that option #2 is a pretty persuasive scientific explanation, can't we?  Redfern clearly thinks so.  He writes of a discussion he had with his friend, Joshua Warren, on the subject:

Could it be that certain animals of a strange and fantastic nature seen today are actually the spirits or ghosts of creatures that became extinct thousands of years ago?  As fantastic as such a scenario might sound, maybe we shouldn’t outright dismiss it.

Indeed, paranormal expert and good friend Joshua P. Warren, the author of the highly-relevant book, Pet Ghosts, told me that he had extensively investigated a series of encounters with apparitional, ancient animals on farmland at Lancaster, South Carolina – one of which seemed to resemble nothing less than a spectral pterodactyl.  Josh seriously mused upon the possibility that the ghostly presence of certain extinct animals might very well help explain sightings of monstrous beasts in our presence to this very day.

“Maybe Bigfoot is a phantimal,” said Josh to me, utilizing a term he uses to describe ghostly beasts, “perhaps even the ghost of a prehistoric creature, similar to the enormous extinct possible ape, Gigantopithecus, or maybe even the spirits of primitive humans.”

Okay.  Right.  A "phantimal."  So, what we've succeeded in accomplishing here is to take something that is potentially open to investigation (I hesitate to call what the Finding Bigfoot people did "investigation"), and place it entirely outside of the realm of what is even theoretically verifiable.

Redfern and Warren seem to think that this is a good thing.  If all of those people who claim to have seen Bigfoot are actually seeing a spectral proto-hominid, then the lack of evidence somehow becomes a point in favor of the claim, right?

Ghostly Sasquatches, after all, leave behind no hair samples.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pike's Peak highway bigfoot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This seems mighty convenient to me.  It takes all of the objections that skeptics have to the cryptozoology thing, and dismisses them at one fell swoop: "Of course there's no tangible proof.  If we're right, there' wouldn't be."  It also explains all of the cryptid sightings with equal facility.  Nessie and Cadborosaurus are spirit pleisiosaurs. Mokèlé-Mbèmbé is the ghost of a brachiosaurus.  Black Shuck and El Chupacabra are the ghosts of deceased canines.  Sheepsquatch is the ghost of... well, I still don't know what the fuck Sheepsquatch is.  But the ghost of some prehistoric mammal or another.

All of this, of course, just goes to show something that I've commented upon before; there's no crazy idea out there that's so outlandish that someone can't elaborate upon it so as to make it even crazier.  We take something for which there is no evidence, but which at least isn't biologically impossible (the existence of cryptids), and put it in a blender with another thing for which there is no evidence (the existence of ghosts), and pour out a wonderful new Woo-Woo Smoothie -- Cryptids are the Ghosts of Prehistoric Animals.

Maybe we can elaborate it further, you think?  Maybe the spirit animals are actually in contact with... aliens!  That's it, the spirit animals are spies and are relaying information on us to their alien overlords!  I'm sure that somehow it's all tied up with the Roswell Incident, HAARP, and the Illuminati.

Or maybe I should just shut the hell up, because every time I say, "Ha-ha, surely nobody believes this," I turn out to be disproven within twenty-four hours.

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