Review: Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals

I am always up for a bit of pop science. Well-written, accessible books conveying interesting scientific topics to the layperson are right up there with gripping historical non-fiction in my list of good books to curl up with, and when I saw 'Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals' by Becky Crew, I thought it had some potential along those lines. It's a series of essays on various animals with strange habits or odd biology, from the naked mole rat to the killifish (the titular "astronaut fish") to the great tit (the titular "zombie bird").

The problem is that Crew sells the book as a sort of humorous-yet-informative collection of essays, but the line of demarcation between "humorous" and "informative" is a lot thicker than it perhaps needed to be. Instead of trying to find interesting and funny ways to describe the unusual animals, she includes either a preface or a postscript that imagines the animal's behavior in human civilization. To be honest, these generally come off as somewhat strained ("Imagine if this frog jumped off of tall platforms...in a job interview!") and repetitive, but the bigger problem is that the essays they bracket tend to be dry recitations of fact.

The facts are extremely solid, though. The book is drier than what I was expecting, but it's an extremely well-researched collection of facts about obscure animals and the way that new techniques have illuminated more and more details about the animal kingdom. From details about the way that a fossil's eye sockets can tell us what time of day a dinosaur hunted to descriptions of animals only found miles below the ocean surface, Crew does a magnificent job of showing the way that we are peeling back the mysteries of the natural world.

So although I could wish for a bit more of the book that was described on the back cover, I do have to say that in all fairness it's a sound science book. Just a bit less "pop science" than I was hoping for.

Birdees!

I've never been much of a bird-watcher; my parents liked to have a bird-feeder outside their window ever since I was a kid, but to me they weren't nearly as cool as animals that would stay still and let you pet them (which we weren't allowed to have, I might add). Still, I'll admit I make exceptions for three factors, and today reminded me of one of them.

1) Color. Even though I never cared much about the birds at the feeder, it was still a special experience when a brilliantly vivid cardinal or blue jay stopped by. Crows (and similar dull-black birds), sparrows and the like were always just sort of there, but it was always neat to see a brightly-colored bird catch the eye.

2) Size. This is what today's bird sighting reminded me of--the building I work at is situated slightly oddly, at the very edge of a small industrial park that nestles up to a wildlife sanctuary. Which means that there are office buildings on three sides...and the window right outside my desk looks down onto a parking lot right next to open wilderness and a river beyond. There are twenty-three wild turkeys milling around the parking lot, any one of which would easily come up to my knee. They're not particularly pretty birds (although again, their head provides a vivid contrast to the gray-black pavement) but man, are they impressive to watch. They're just bigger than you feel a bird should be allowed to be, and you feel a little bit of that primal connection between birds and dinosaurs as you watch them strut around.

3) Propensity for violence. The Twin Cities has a thriving raptor population that has figured out that streetlights make much better perches than tree branches. They're taller, they support the bird's weight better, and they don't have any branches to obscure vision. So on just about any drive through the city, spaced roughly every two to three miles (raptors are territorial birds) you can see a red-tailed hawk watching for prey, or sometimes if you're very lucky a peregrine falcon or a bald eagle (the latter are more common around the Mississippi River). Again, right outside my window I frequently spot small flocks of turkey vultures, lazily surfing the updrafts and keeping an eye out for something they can scavenge. They're astonishingly beautiful birds, even the turkey vultures; their smooth, sleek lines make them look like they're swooping even when they're standing still, and occasionally you'll see one dive with amazing speed and come up with a small mammal gripped in their talons.

There are obviously a few birds that score in multiple categories--hummingbirds, for example, while tiny, get multipliers for color and propensity to violence (plus their speed makes them eye-catching in their own unique way). But for the most part, when you see me stop in amazement at a bird, it's either big or bright or a sleek hunter. I feel very privileged that I get to stop in amazement so often.

My Vision for Mars

I was reading this article on the Mars One project the other day (warning: the article is worksafe, but the title may not be something you want to have front and center when your boss walks in) and thinking about the key point therein: We do not have the technology to sustain human life on Mars, because things break and spare parts are somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 million miles away. According to the article, we will not truly be able to set up a colony on Mars until we can make it self-sustaining...that is to say, until everything the Martian colonists need can be found on Mars itself.

And it got me thinking. We are, in some ways, already deep in the post-human era of humankind. We are still somewhat limited in the ways we can modify ourselves (although growing less limited by the day) but we are already to the point where we can make surrogate bodies that are able to better withstand inhospitable environments and that technology is improving with vast leaps on a daily basis. Mars One talks about sending people to Mars to set up a colony, but why bother when we can make shiny metal people who do whatever we tell them and don't need to breathe?

My vision is this: We begin sending robots to Mars. Not just one or two, like Spirit and Opportunity, and not just to explore. We design a robot or a team of robots that can find out if there are natural resources on Mars that humans could use to create a self-sustaining colony--water, mineral resources, fuel, et cetera--and then, and this is the cool bit, we send robots that are miniature factories. They would be able to build the colony...and this is the really cool bit...and they would also be able to machine parts to build more robots and repair/replace parts from broken robots. Basically, I'm talking von Neumann machines, but with an end goal of building a self-sustaining, habitable environment suitable for humans. I know it sounds like science fiction, but so does building a self-propelled camera to go take a look at Pluto and that happened last month.

And once we have that, well...then we can start the big step. We can live on Mars, and I feel sure that someday we will. But the smart way to do it is send our shiny metal children ahead of us to prepare the way.

A Public Service Announcement About...THE PLAGUE!

Seriously, do not worry about the plague.

This has been in the news lately, because apparently reporters have the attention span of goldfish and if something happens with less frequency than, say, once a year it becomes an entirely new event that must be breathlessly reported on each time it happens. (And if something happens twice in a year, it's a "trend".) But yes, someone picked up a case of bubonic plague, because that is a real disease that still exists and can be communicated to humans.

But this is not a thing to worry about. I mean, obviously it is if you have it, because it's a serious disease that can be fatal if not treated, but we are not due for a bubonic plague pandemic. Obama does not need to have a plan for the bubonic plague. Because we already have a plan for the bubonic plague, and it's "don't go play with wild rodents". It's worked very well for a long period of time, and I suspect it will continue to work for generations to come.

The reason that you will, occasionally, hear about people getting the plague is because about 150 years ago (give or take), the bubonic plague crossed from Eurasia to the Americas (probably through rats coming into San Franciso, where there was a significant outbreak among the Chinese immigrant population at the time) and got into the wild rodent population. Plague is transmitted via flea bite, and rodents tend to be social animals, so when one of them gets it, they all do. This isn't a big deal if you're a rat or a prairie dog, because it's much less deadly to rodents than it is to humans, but humans that come into close contact with sick rodents can be infected as the fleas jump from the dying animal to the healthy human.

A thousand years ago, this was a pretty big deal, because sanitation and hygiene and proper food storage were all things that hadn't been invented yet. Rats? All over the damn place. Sick and dying rats? You could find them in the gutters, the wells, the barns, the outhouses, your kitchen...and where there were dead rats, there were hungry and desperate fleas to carry the plague to the nearest warm body. And antibiotics? Not even a glimmer in anyone's eye. Hell, they didn't even know how the plague was being transmitted. Being swarmed by a cloud of fleas after handling a dead rat and dying of bubonic plague were just a couple of weird coincidences to medieval peasants.

But these days, all of that is very different. Rodent populations in the American Southwest are too widely scattered, and contact with humans is too infrequent, for the plague to spread far or happen often. Even when the occasional rat or mouse gets close to a human, we have an arsenal of traps, poisons, and other means to keep it from becoming a breeding colony that could infect large numbers of people. The disease is contracted so rarely, and is taken so seriously by medical officials when it happens, that there's almost no chance of an antibiotic-resistant strain popping up. And direct human-to-human transmission of the disease is incredibly rare even by the standards of the six to seven cases a year that crop up; it needs the rats and the fleas to spread to human beings, and modern civilization has taken a lot of care to make sure that we don't see either one very often.

So basically, avoid playing with wild rodents, especially ones that are sick, dying or already dead, and you should be fine. If you find a dead rat, take appropriate precautions when handling its corpse and you should be fine. If you feel sick after handling a dead rat with your bare hands (and why did you do that? Did you not read anything else in this blog post?) then go see a doctor, and you should be fine. If you read an article about the plague and start panicking, re-read this post, possibly while drinking a glass of red wine, and you should be fine. If you're fine already, you should continue to be fine.

This has been a public service announcement about...THE PLAGUE!

Evolutionary Biology for Jackasses

The other day, I was reading an article on the Gawker network about American culture and obesity. The article didn't really stick in my head (which is why I didn't link to it) but one of the comments did. It was someone insisting that all of the medical information indicating that there is a heritable component to obesity, and that it's easier for some people to lose weight than others, is all being completely overstated and overblown by fat people who don't want to admit that they're too lazy to lose weight. His argument was that there couldn't be a genetic element to obesity, because there's no way evolution would select for a trait that made you overweight, because you'd have a hard time escaping predators.

Now, I know that you, my regular audience, is far too intelligent to fall for that line. But on the off-chance that someone is wandering into my blog for the first time and actually believes this, I will explain it to you in simple terms.

For approximately 99.999995% of the 3.5 billion years life has existed on this planet, for approximately 99.999995% of the living beings on this planet, food has been scarce. Starvation has been a real and omnipresent risk for every single living thing for longer than human beings can actually comprehend, and even today, a relatively tiny percentage of a relatively tiny number of species can actually avoid this food scarcity. As a result, life on Earth has spent 3.5 billion years adapting to become the most efficient energy storage machines it is possible to be. Your mind may know that there is food in the store on the corner, but your body is the inheritor of a vast and complex legacy that knows, on a genetic level, that the next meal may not come for days.

Human beings have not adapted to deal well with a super-abundance of food for the same reason that we have not adapted to deal well with leprechaun attacks, or rampaging unicorns. It's just fundamentally something we have never encountered in any meaningful sense. To suggest that somehow primitive Twinkies tempted our proto-hominid ancestors, and that evolution favored the lean and the mean over the mastodon-hide couch potatoes until the modern generation started going to hell in a handbasket, is to be fundamentally ignorant of the basic facts of biology. You know how you can tell this? Because actual evolutionary biologists are telling you.

So let's face that basic fact. Losing weight is something that basic biology makes it hard for many people to do. If you are one of the people for whom it is easy, congratulations. I'm very happy for you. But please don't imagine that this is somehow due to your superior moral fiber, OK? Thanks.