Giant squid attempt beachhead at Santa Cruz

As part of our ongoing campaign here to make you doublecheck to see which one of the bloggers here wrote a post, I offer this story about a mass stranding of Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, near Santa Cruz, California. Hundreds of the poor things have washed up on the beaches around Santa Cruz in the last few days:

Humboldt squid have been seen in much greater than usual numbers in Monterey Bay, where the stranding took place, since 2000 or so. Before that there were more commonly associated with nearby semitropical bodies of water like the Sea of Cortez. Some have conjectured that warming ocean temperatures have encourage the giant squid to move northward.

The Sea of Cortez lies atop a geological rift valley at the north end of the East Pacific Rise, and as a result of the tectonic rifting, which is peeling the Baja Peninsula and some of Southern California away from the North American continent, the Sea reaches depths of about 3,000 meters, or close to 10,000 feet.

In other words,  the heating up of a deep rift is thought to have played a role in an invasion of squid. #ftbullies

Santa Cruz is a pretty strongly feminist town, but perhaps the squid were aiming for the boyzone tech communities of Silicon Valley, just across the mountains.

More prosaically, it’s possible something similar to the well-known seasonal red tide bloom might have poisoned the squid. Apparently some of the dead squid have tested positive for domoic acid, a bioaccumulative algal toxin.

Really, the best thing about this story is the San Jose Mercury News’ description of the Humboldt squid:

The dark red squid beached during the weekend are 2 to 3 feet long with enormous eyes and long tentacles extending from their mouth. Their predators include blue sharks, sperm whales and Risso’s dolphins. They eat 50 to 60 different species of fish, can change their size from generation to generation to cope with varying food supplies, and can reproduce in huge numbers. The larger females produce translucent egg sacks the size of a small car containing 20 million to 30 million eggs.

It would take egg sacs the size of a small car to try to swim over the Santa Cruz Mountains to bully the tech boys. Ave atque vale, brave molluscs.

αEP: Complexity is not usually the product of selection

This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come.

By the way, people are wondering about the α in the title. Don’t you people do any immunology? α is standard shorthand for “anti”.

I mentioned in the last one this annoying tendency of too many pro-evolution people to cite “complexity” as a factor that supports the assertion of selection for a trait. Strangely, the intelligent design creationists also yell “Complexity!” at the drop of a hat, only it’s to prove that evolution can’t work.

They’re both wrong.

I ran across a prime example of this recently in a post by John Wilkins (It’s pick-on-John-Wilkins day! Hooray!)

[Read more…]

αEP: The fundamental failure of the evolutionary psychology premise

This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come.

I have a real problem with evolutionary psychology, and it goes right to the root of the discipline: it’s built on a flawed foundation. It relies on a naïve and simplistic understanding of how evolution works (a basic misconception that reminds me of another now-dead discipline, which I’ll write about later) — it appeals to many people, though, because that misconception aligns nicely with the cartoon version of evolution in most people’s heads, and it also means that every time you criticize evolutionary psychology, you get a swarm of ignorant defenders who assume you’re attacking evolution itself.

That misconception is adaptationism.

[Read more…]

Rabies vaccinations: now without agony.

Salon writer Irin Carmon was bitten by a strange dog in Brooklyn this weekend, and though the wound itself wasn’t too bad the call is out for people who might know the dog:

Hours later, I found a small actual wound and went to the ER, where they told me I have ten days to either find the dog to find out if it’s up to date on its shots, or get a miserable suite of shots. Or die of rabies.

So if you have any recollection of this dog in the Park Slope area, especially paired with the characteristics above, email me at icarmon@salon.com or, if you know me, contact me on whatever platform you want.

Irin has a lot of friends online, so the message is spreading quickly among the Park Slope dog set, and I wish her luck finding the dog.

But some of the messages going out to try to help her might end up reinforcing an inadvertent anti-vaccination message, to wit: the notion that rabies shots are an experience that you really, really want to avoid, because they involve two dozen painful injections in the abdomen with very long needles.

And who wouldn’t bend over backwards to avoid that kind of experience? Possibly even to the point of not seeking medical advice after a potentially dangerous bite?

But the urban-legend-style description of rabies vaccinations just isn’t true. Hasn’t been for a generation.

In 2004 my ex-wife took it upon herself to capture, tame and adopt out a gigantic crop of feral kittens in my old neighborhood in the SF Bay Area. One of them we caught almost too late to tame.

Did Not Want

I foolishly picked the kitten up with my bare hands, and after about 45 seconds of me not listening to it as it told me to put it down immediately, it escalated to a physical demonstration of its displeasure. Dissolve to me standing over the sink, losing copious amounts of blood from my right hand.

We had the choice of quarantining the kitten for a couple of weeks at animal control, destroying almost any chance that we could tame it during its last couple weeks of kittenhood, or me going in for rabies vaccinations. I picked that second option, and so over the next week and a half I got a pair of 11-milliliter rabies immunoglobulin injections in the ass, and five rabies vaccine shots in the upper arm. And a tetanus booster.

Some people do react to the vacccine, but for me the tetanus booster was more unpleasant by an order of magnitude, and that was less painful than the bite. The rabies vaccinations themselves, if given by someone good with a syringe, are nothing to fear. The worst part of the whole thing was driving to the hospital. And the kitten got adopted by someone who wanted a challenge.

The risk of dogs being carriers of rabies is a lot lower than it used to be in the United States, due to a decades-long interagency government vaccination campaign targeted at all dogs in the country. Some authorities use the phrase “eradicated,” which is probably slightly optimistic. But wild animals are still reservoirs; a sick animal doesn’t need to bite you to inoculate you with the disease, and the rabies virus can multiply quietly in your body for decades while you remain asymptomatic. And if you are infected, the math is pretty simple:

  • 100 percent of people infected with rabies who become symptomatic will die of the disease, assuming they don’t get hit by a truck first;
  • 100 percent of people exposed to rabies who are properly vaccinated before they become symptomatic will survive exposure.

It’s hard to argue against getting the vaccine, in other words.

[notice][Update and clarification: I said here that 100% of humans who develop rabies without vaccine treatment die of the disease, and 100% of those vaccinated in time do not. A reader has noted that six people who developed rabies symptoms have survived as a result of a still-experimental protocol involving induced coma and anti-viral drugs whose first successful use was in 2004.  Worldwide, about 70,000 people died of rabies in 2011, and as the new treatment has rescued an average of .75 people per year since 2004, the global mortality figure for those who develop rabies symptoms worldwide should actually be on the order of 99.999989%. I regret the sloppiness.][/notice]

 

Of course, since the health care distribution system in the United States is almost irremediably fucked, it turns out that the rabies immunoglobulin injections can be ridiculously costly if you don’t have good insurance. Not quite rattlesnake antivenin expensive, but high enough, in the four figure range, to ensure that if we did have a lot of rabid dogs in the US the poor would die of rabies and the affluent would be only mildly inconvenienced. (Another reason I’m lastingly grateful for my ex’s teachers’ union and its sane, humane health plan with the $5 and $10 co-pays.)

But that disincentive only means that it’s even more important not to add more disincentives to vaccination, especially those that border on urban legend. The shots were invasive and painful from the 1960s through the 1980s. Since then, not so much. The prospect of needing rabies shots is daunting enough without untruths about scary pain being spread around on Facebook and Twitter. Anti-vax myths can take a lot of different forms, mutating into strains spread by pro-vax people. Let’s not keep spreading this one.

And let’s hope Irin Carmon finds the people who own the dog that bit her, so they can cover her medical expenses.

Maybe every wolf should have a name

We’ve been having a wolf hunt here in Minnesota this year, and so far about 150 wolves have been killed (by the way, don’t read the comments at that link; our bold brave wolf trappers are accusing critics of being “trannies” who have to squat to pee — it’s amazing how this toxic machismo poisons so many things). But the news in the NY Times is that a famous wolf has been killed. That’s 832F, the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack in Yellowstone.

She’s wearing a radio collar. She was a prominent member of a visible pack, and well known to journalists and tourists. Unfortunately, she wandered out of the protected confines of the national park (funny how animals don’t notice artificial boundaries) and was shot. The male in this photo was also shot a few weeks ago. All of these kills were perfectly legal, as are the kills in Minnesota.

It’s disturbing that we should have a desire to restore and maintain the richness of a complex ecosystem, but our solution is to hand ignorant yahoos a license to flex their barbaric masculinity by gunning down key species; a solution that also props up an unsustainable compromise that allows agricultural interests priority over rational land use. We use national resources to subsidize a small number of ranchers — we basically set aside these tracts of land as a national preserve, and instead we bought grazing land for sheep farmers.

You want to profit off the open land? Consider wolf kills of your livestock to be a tax on your privileges.

Friday Cephalopod: Self portrait

It’s the last day of classes, after a very long and agonizing semester, and this guy looks how I feel: stressed, with gnashy tentacles and a livid complexion. I feel for any students who come to my office with questions about the final — I’m straining to be nice and helpful, but what I really want to do is rampage through the ocean shredding everything I meet.

OK, deep breaths. Deeeeep breaths. I will get through this day. Just dream of Squidmas, all will be well.

(via Arkive)

A century of California herps

Western fence lizard, crappy phone camera shot from Stebbins’ Western Reptiles and Amphibians, Second Edition, painting by Robert C. Stebbins

One of the really cool things about being involved in the California Natural History Biz is that the science is pretty young. (In the sense of Western Science As She Is Peer-Reviewed, that is: people were studying nature in California thousands of years before it was called California.) The earliest years of plant exploration in California took place only in the late 18th century, the era of von Chamisso, of Douglas and Menzies. The California Academy of Sciences, the oldest natural history association in the Western US, was only founded in 1853 — at which point the Royal Society was older than the California Academy is now. Many of the big names in the field were working within living memory. Clinton Hart Merriam was still around in the 1940s, for instance. Edmund Jaeger, that most influential of California desert naturalists, only died in 1983, recently enough that I can feasibly resent never having met him.

I really resent not having met Bob Stebbins: we’ve talked on the phone a number of times, spent a couple of decades living within a few miles of each other, and he was kind enough to give me carte blanche to use any of his paintings in a local publication I used to edit. Missed opportunity: Bob is still around, but he’s moved from his long-time home in the Berkeley Hills to a convalescent setup in Oregon, and seeing as he has been exploring the world since March 1915, it’s understandable he doesn’t get out to socialize as much as he used to back when he was a younger man in his 80s.

Robert Cyril Stebbins has a list of publications longer than that of anyone else I can think of, but what he’s best known for is his Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, an indispensible Peterson Field Guide for which Stebbins painted the color plates. He’s one of those frustrating people with consummate skills in multiple worlds when most of us struggle to do well in one at a time. Bob could easily have been a successful commercial artist if he hadn’t chosen to go for the big bucks as a herpetologist. He’s been officially retired from his professor job at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology since 1978, which means that as of last year he’s been a professor emeritus longer than he was a professor nonemeritus: he started at the MVZ in 1945.

From his undergrad work to the present day he’s done as much to expand our knowledge of the California desert as anyone else, living or not, and he’s worked as much to protect that land as to study its herpetological inhabitants. He was among the people who worked to establish the East Mojave National Scenic Area, the BLM-managed precursor to the Mojave National Preserve, as a way of protecting its tortoises and other wildlife from the disruptions of industrial human society. He was especially active in working to limit off-road vehicle racing in desert wildlands, which up until the current explosion of utility-scale public lands renewable energy development was the single worst threat to desert landscapes. A bon mot from his testimony in 1987 before the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands, National Parks, and Forests of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources:

“Permitting widespread ORV recreation in the desert is worse than allowing recreational chain-sawing in the nation’s forests. Forests potentially can recover.The desert probably cannot.”

I’m prompted to write about Bob Stebbins because he’s been doing some writing about himself, putting together his fieldwork memoirs starting at age 95. Herpetologist Matthew Bettelheim has been, with the permission and assistance of the Stebbins family, publishing sections of those memoirs in a running column on his blog. The short pieces are fascinating, a glimpse into the last century of California herpetological field work by a man who has been at the center of that work for most of that last century. Thanks, Matthew, for making them accessible to us.

And thanks, Bob, for putting them together.