Tales From The Outside

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Surfer and Sea Otter 841 ⒸTheMercuryNews Sea Otter 841 ⒸGVWire tagged-otter-rw06-178-1600-1 ⒸPD Southern Sea Otter ⒸGary Coronado : Los Angeles Times Sea Otter tag 1 ⒸMonterrey Bay Aquarium Sea Otter tag 2 ⒸMonterrey Bay Aquarium Southern Sea Otter ⒸGary Coronado : Los Angeles Times Sea Otter 841 ⒸTheSanfranciscoStandard Sea Otter 841 ⒸOtterDaily Sea Otter ⒸAP and Haven Daley Sea otter 841 ⒸOfCaliFashionLLC Great Ape ⒸThe Far Side & Gary Larson 841 ice-cream ⒸKSBW:Mariannes Ice Cream Santa Cruz Santa Cruz Otter 841 warning ⒸCBSNews nasa-otter-tag-on-flipper ⒸMonterrey Bay Aquarium Official surfing Otter 841 California Sea Otter 841 hoodie.jpg Previous Next "It was fun to see them playing or sunning themselves among the kelp. It was far more fun than the thought of beads to wear around my neck."

Scott O'Dellwas an American writer of 26 novels for young people, along with three novels for adults and four nonfiction books. He wrote historical fiction, primarily, including several children's novels about historical California and Mexico. ""We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

William Ingewas an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, including Picnic, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. "It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature" "Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god."

Francis Picabiawas a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. "Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason."

Orson Welleswas an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. "In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."

Thomas Szaszwas a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. "I've never met an animal I didn't like, and I can't say the same thing about people."

Doris Daywas an American actress, singer, and animal rights activist. "It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land."

Sitting Bullwas a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. He was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him, at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement. "To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt."

Mikhail Bakuninwas a Russian revolutionary anarchist. He is among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major figure in the revolutionary socialist, social anarchist, and collectivist anarchist traditions. "We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain."

Augustine of Hippoalso known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions. "We [Americans] are game-playing, fun-loving creatures; we are the otters of the universe."

Richard Bachis an American writer. He has written numerous works of fiction and also non-fiction flight-related titles. His works include Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977), both of which were among the 1970s' biggest sellers. "Nature does not compromise; a pelican is not a compromise between a crow and otter, it is just a pelican. Any inefficient products are recalled to the manufacturer!"

Amory Lovinsis an American writer, physicist, and former chairman/chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute "Over-population is the cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants."

Ted Turneris an American entrepreneur, television producer, media proprietor, and philanthropist. He founded the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television, which later became TBS. "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."

Bill Wattersonis an American cartoonist who authored the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. "The cognitive dissonance, the denial and cowardice that spare us painful truths and prevent us from acting in defense of innocent victims while allowing 'beloved' individuals to continue their heinous behavior must be jettisoned from the bottom of our souls."

Mira Sorvinois an American actress. She won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite (1995) "When I hear so-called professional journalists ask why we have celebrities speak for us and for the animals, the environment or social causes, I marvel at their denial of the rules of their own trade."

Paul Watson Doeis a Canadian-American conservation and environmental activist, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an anti-poaching and direct action group focused on marine conservation activism. Previous Next

On Sea-Otters On Surfboards

If you happen to have visited Santa Cruz in Northern California recently you couldn't have helped noticing a massive marketing and merchandising PR campaign.

It's not promoting some local underdog politician, injured athlete, or beleaguered community member in need of the community's assistance. There are no commemorative badges, ribbons, or flags to fly off your front porch. Yet.

But it's given birth to a seemingly unending product-line of t-shirts, hats, flags, coffee-mugs, and coolies all sporting its image. One whose windfall-profits will never benefit the featured superstar at the center of it all. Who just happens to be a Southern Sea Otter with the official designation Sea Otter 841.

Essentially an ocean-going weasel, sea-otters are well-adapted to Central California's coast. Local beach-goers routinely see them diving, eating, and preening their water-proof coats in the rich kelp-forest ecosystem just off-shore. And this critter has suddenly adopted some highly unusual and seriously unnatural public behavior for them to watch.

That is; "aggressively commandeering the surfboards and kayaks of people", literally chasing surfers off their boards and kayakers to abandon ship!

She, as we've since learned, has moved from a local story to a runaway-meme in the International-Science-News segment. The bold marine-mammal is now widely regarded as either a menace to society or a local hero.

Yet all the official warnings about 841 and how to avoid her have actually accomplished is to divide this local beach-town into two distinctly separate and increasingly hostile camps. Whose divergent sentiments have rapidly spread to all the global newshounds around the world eagerly consuming every broadcast and online announcement.

Typically, her story only went viral after a series of very public humiliations suffered by the dragnet assembled to capture her. Comprising staff from both the State of California and US Fish & Wildlife Services, along with sea-otter experts from The Monterrey Bay Aquarium, 841 has handily eluded them all for over a month now.

A high-metabolism, inherited from their land-dwelling weasel-like ancestors, paved the way for them to thrive in the chilly Pacific Oceans's coastal environment. It forced them to adapt a lifestyle of catching and eating an urchin, clam, oyster, crab, lobster, octopus, squid, or fish every 15 minutes or so to stave off hypothermia.

Which could go a long way to explain why all of 841's conflicts with surfers so far have been brief and infrequent. So, despite all the hoopla, at their worst the sea-otter's unique biology actually makes them a brief-nuisance presenting a low-threat level to people out and about on the California coast.

Given that sort of rich irony, as always the ultimate narrative will depend solely on which camp ends up writing it. Science and the truth always get lost when there's revenue to be made!

And this episode rather neatly underscores the naïveté plaguing many, if not most of the world's well-meaning animal-husbandry efforts.

For me, however, this controversy "jumped the shark" just last week when 841 was awarded her own flavor in a local Santa Cruz ice-cream shop. The local newspaper, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, reported it this way;

"…the mania is in full effect now that a local ice cream shop has honored her with an ice cream flavor. Marianne's in Santa Cruz announced on their social media pages Sunday that 'Otter-841 Ice Cream' is now available in each of their three local stores.

Their 106th flavor is made of cinnamon sea-salt caramel ice cream laced with snickerdoodle dough chunks courtesy of Pacific Cookie Company."

The only real puzzler in all this, including why a sea-otter might deserve its own ice cream flavor, is the constant speculation about "Why a Sea Otter would do such a thing?"

While not all animals raised in captivity by humans suffer this fate, it is demonstrably true of this family-line.

Because 841's mother was a "problem-otter" herself, forced to give birth there due her own delinquent past full of unnatural altercations with local boaters and fishermen. It should hardly be a surprise to anyone that sometime between infancy and adulthood 841 lost her natural fear of humanity.

Here's some background information on 841's history and family-tree;

"Her mother had her own share of human trouble. Known as 723, she was a rescued orphan rehabilitated at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Staff members go to great lengths to ensure that otters being prepared for release don’t associate “anything positive” with humans. Caretakers wear black ponchos to hide their human form and avoid speaking around the creatures so they don’t get used to people’s voices, Connor said.

723 was back in the wild for about a year before she began approaching kayakers and others, soliciting food. There was “clear evidence” that people had been feeding her, and officials determined she had lost her fear of humans and would be better off living in captivity.

And turned out she was pregnant ― with 841.

After 841 was weaned, she was prepared for and released to the wild. But, like her mother, she started approaching humans after around a year. As for her mother, 723 had to be permanently relocated and currently resides in the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California."

~ courtesy of The Huffington Post

Why this seminal bit of background information has consistently been the least mentioned detail relayed in the news is a total mystery to me. It makes all the speculation maddeningly moot. Whether actively seeking us out for food, fellowship, repressed anger for her captive upbringing, or just plain old loneliness…

she apparently still can't resist sliding back into her unnaturally acquired human-character when some hapless surfer or curious kayaker catches her attention.

According to ~ J. Patricia MacCormack, a Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University;

"We need to learn to share the Earth. And for that we need to change both our language and behaviour. Combat metaphors must be replaced with language about sharing and opening space for the animal.

A huge part of the problem stems from some ancient advice disguised as religious-dogma that many still consider to be legitimate gospel on how human beings should live.

"Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

~from the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1: Verses 28-to-30

I can't for the life of me think of a worse piece of advice for human-beings honored with the precious gift of life. The notion of "sharing the Earth" versus "subduing and dominating all that walks, crawls, swims, and flies" heralds a critical ecological and sociological crossroads.

It seems likely that 841 will be caught one day soon, even if it comes to having to tranquilize her, a dangerous process that can end up with the sleepy animal managing to slip away only to drown later, losing consciousness in the local waters' thick kelp forest then battered to death in the rocky coast's constant surf.

Will we ever just give in and start listening to nature, obeying rather than defying its physical laws that every other form of life on Earth obeys without question? What is it that can finally convince us to abandon these destructive myths from our largely ignorant prehistoric-past, to accept that all life is irrevocably intertwined? Only the passage of time will tell that tale.

If we listen, assuming anyone is left by then who still remembers how to read and write, new chapters will be written attesting to how humanity's reason and humility finally won out over our capacity to spend our lives wallowing in both ignorance and hubris.

If not, the Sea Otter's immediate comeback naturally following humanity's self-imposed extinction will be the last will and testament of the folly inherent to humanity's decision to live as if we are above the laws of nature known to rule every other form of life!

We aren't. And I think we all know it. Let's all hope we can change for the better. Because the alternative is an old story on planet Earth. Just ask the Dinosaurs. Oh, yeah, we can't. Because they went extinct 65-million years ago.

Given no choice, not a hint of advance warning, the earth-bound comet that took them out left them no leeway to accommodate the massive changes that collision wrought.

But we do. We might well have evolved the capacity "to think our way out of extinction".

Given how much we've learned about the natural world in just the last 200 years of our 200,000 year run as Homo sapiens, hope springs eternal.

Our intelligence, compassion, and social-structure have allowed us to alter our behavior after planet-wide challenges like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, glacial-intrusion, sea-level-changes, and even bombardment from space in the past. A better understanding of and connection to the natural world can only help us predict when those kinds of changes are required before suchu cataclysmic events occur.

Since 841 has proven that sea-otters aren't up to the task of accommodating us, that job is ours.

We might just have evolved enough to be able to pull it off. Maybe that sea-salted ice-cream was not such a bad idea after all, eh?

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On Sea-Otters On Surfboards

Surfer and Sea Otter 841 ⒸTheMercuryNews Sea Otter 841 ⒸFlipboard Sea Otter 841 ⒸTheSanfranciscoStandard Sea Otter 841 ⒸOtterDaily Now That's a Great Ape @TheFar Side & Gary Larson Sea Otter ⒸAP and Haven Daley Santa Cruz Otter 841 warning ⒸCBSNews Sea Otter tag 1 ⒸMonterrey Bay Aquarium Sea Otter tag 2 ⒸMonterrey Bay Aquarium Sea-Otter 841 Ice-Cream ⒸKSBW:Mariannes Ice Cream Santa Cruz Sea Otter 841 ⒸGVWire Sea Otter 841 ⒸOfCaliFashionLLC Sea Otter 841 ⒸYesWeFollow Official surfing Otter 841 California Sea Otter 841 hoodie.jpg Previous Next "It was fun to see them playing or sunning themselves among the kelp. It was far more fun than the thought of beads to wear around my neck."

Scott O'Dell was an American writer of 26 novels for young people, along with three novels for adults and four nonfiction books. "We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

William Ingewas an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. CEO "It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature "Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god."

Sitting Bullwas a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. "To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt."

John DoeSaint Augustine Augustine of Hippo, "We [Americans] are game-playing, fun-loving creatures; we are the otters of the universe."

Richard Bachis an American writer. He has written numerous works of fiction and also non-fiction flight-related titles. His works include Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977), both of which were among the 1970s' biggest sellers. "Nature does not compromise; a pelican is not a compromise between a crow and otter, it is just a pelican. Nature makes no compromises; any inefficient products are recalled to the manufacturer!"

Amory Lovinsis an American writer, physicist, and former chairman/chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. "Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants."

Ted Turner Doeis an American entrepreneur, television producer, media proprietor, and philanthropist. He founded the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television, which later became TBS. "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."

Bill Wattersonis an American cartoonist who authored the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes "The cognitive dissonance, the denial and cowardice that spare us painful truths and prevent us from acting in defense of innocent victims while allowing 'beloved' individuals to continue their heinous behavior must be jettisoned from the bottom of our souls.

On Sea-Otters On SurfboardsIf you happen to have visited Santa Cruz in Northern California recently you couldn't have helped noticing a massive marketing and merchandising PR campaign.It's not promoting some local underdog politician, injured athlete, or beleaguered community member in need of the community's assistance. There are no commemorative badges, ribbons, or flags to fly off your front porch. Yet.But it's given birth to a seemingly unending product-line of t-shirts, hats, flags, coffee-mugs, and coolies all sporting its image. One whose windfall-profits will never benefit the featured superstar at the center of it all. Who just happens to be a Southern Sea Otter with the official designation Sea Otter 841.

That is; "aggressively commandeering the surfboards and kayaks of people", literally chasing surfers off their boards and kayakers to abandon ship!

There's the "Catch her before she bites someone" supporters, which is a distinct possibility given the growing toothy-aggression she's displayed to the surfers and kayakers she's challenged. Which hasn't happened yet, but seems inevitable, eventually. These people are offset by the "Leave her alone, we're invading her territory" protesters, some of whom have had to abandon their water-craft until she swam away.Yet all the official warnings about 841 and how to avoid her have actually accomplished is to divide this local beach-town into two distinctly separate and increasingly hostile camps. Whose divergent sentiments have rapidly spread to all the global newshounds around the world eagerly consuming every broadcast and online announcement.Typically, her story only went viral after a series of very public humiliations suffered by the dragnet assembled to capture her. Comprising staff from both the State of California and US Fish & Wildlife Services, along with sea-otter experts from The Monterrey Bay Aquarium, 841 has handily eluded them all for over a month now.

As a species, the Sea Otter's tenacious resilience is well-documented. Hunted to near extinction for their incredibly warm and soft fur, our steady encroachment on the coastal ecosystem is threatening to finish the job. Yet, despite our unwillingness to share the bountiful habitat they evolved to colonize over 15 million years ago, they've still managed to survive.A high-metabolism, inherited from their land-dwelling weasel-like ancestors, paved the way for them to thrive in the chilly Pacific Oceans's coastal environment. It forced them to adapt a lifestyle of catching and eating an urchin, clam, oyster, crab, lobster, octopus, squid, or fish every 15 minutes or so to stave off hypothermia.Which could go a long way to explain why all of 841's conflicts with surfers so far have been brief and infrequent. So, despite all the hoopla, at their worst the sea-otter's unique biology actually makes them a brief-nuisance presenting a low-threat level to people out and about on the California coast.Given that sort of rich irony, as always the ultimate narrative will depend solely on which camp ends up writing it. Science and the truth always get lost when there's revenue to be made!And this episode rather neatly underscores the naïveté plaguing many, if not most of the world's well-meaning animal-husbandry efforts.For me, however, this controversy "jumped the shark" just last week when 841 was awarded her own flavor in a local Santa Cruz ice-cream shop. The local newspaper, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, reported it this way;

Their 106th flavor is made of cinnamon sea-salt caramel ice cream laced with snickerdoodle dough chunks courtesy of Pacific Cookie Company."

The only real puzzler in all this, including why a sea-otter might deserve its own ice cream flavor, is the constant speculation about "Why a Sea Otter would do such a thing?"

A reasonable question when posed by arm-chair citizen-scientists, the experts know full well that she was born in captivity at The Monterrey Bay Aquarium, just 20 miles south of Santa Cruz, who understand better than anyone just how easily young animals become habituated to human care. The risk of losing their fear of people, some eventually becoming unable to fend for themselves in the wild, is very real. While not all animals raised in captivity by humans suffer this fate, it is demonstrably true of this family-line. Because 841's mother was a "problem-otter" herself, forced to give birth there due her own delinquent past full of unnatural altercations with local boaters and fishermen. It should hardly be a surprise to anyone that sometime between infancy and adulthood 841 lost her natural fear of humanity.Here's some background information on 841's history and family-tree;

And turned out she was pregnant ― with 841.After 841 was weaned, she was prepared for and released to the wild. But, like her mother, she started approaching humans after around a year. As for her mother, 723 had to be permanently relocated and currently resides in the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California."

~courtesy of The Huffington Post

she apparently still can't resist sliding back into her unnaturally acquired human-character when some hapless surfer or curious kayaker catches her attention.According to ~ J. Patricia MacCormack, a Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University;

"We need to learn to share the Earth. And for that we need to change both our language and behaviour. Combat metaphors must be replaced with language about sharing and opening space for the animal."

Which is the most eloquent and realistic comment I've read about the entire affair so far. And I agree. After all, we are an integral part of Mother Nature, too, despite our capacity to dramatically, even irrevocably alter her work.A huge part of the problem stems from some ancient advice disguised as religious-dogma that many still consider to be legitimate gospel on how human beings should live.

"Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

~from the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1: Verses 28-to-30

So far most of humanity has decided to plug their ears and eyes to the rapidly mounting daily evidence resulting from the mistreatment of the land we live on, the air we breathe, the lakes and rivers we drink from, and even MotherOcean, where everything alive on Earth got its start.Will we ever just give in and start listening to nature, obeying rather than defying its physical laws that every other form of life on Earth obeys without question? What is it that can finally convince us to abandon these destructive myths from our largely ignorant prehistoric-past, to accept that all life is irrevocably intertwined? Only the passage of time will tell that tale.If we listen, assuming anyone is left by then who still remembers how to read and write, new chapters will be written attesting to how humanity's reason and humility finally won out over our capacity to spend our lives wallowing in both ignorance and hubris.If not, the Sea Otter's immediate comeback naturally following humanity's self-imposed extinction will be the last will and testament of the folly inherent to humanity's decision to live as if we are above the laws of nature known to rule every other form of life!We aren't. And I think we all know it. Let's all hope we can change for the better. Because the alternative is an old story on planet Earth. Just ask the Dinosaurs. Oh, yeah, we can't. Because they went extinct 65-million years ago.

Given no choice, not a hint of advance warning, the earth-bound comet that took them out left them no leeway to accommodate the massive changes that collision wrought.

But we do. We might well have evolved the capacity "to think our way out of extinction".Given how much we've learned about the natural world in just the last 200 years of our 200,000 year run as Homo sapiens, hope springs eternal.

So far, we've failed to acquire the wisdom required to live in harmony with every living thing on Earth. Maybe that will start right here in NorCal, by learning how to live with in harmony Sea Otter 841.We might just have evolved enough to be able to pull it off. Maybe that sea-salted ice-cream was not such a bad idea after all, eh?

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Waylaid By Whalesongs Songs of the Humpback Whale ⒸRoger PayneSound Strength ⒸWikimediaClassification of Humpback Whale Sounds ⒸMBARIRaven Pro ⒸCornell Lab of OrnithologyRaven Pro ⒸCornell Lab of OrnithologyBritish Virgin Islands ⒸGoogleMapsrings-bubble-tools ⒸHakai MagazineWhales, Summaries, and the US Navy ⒸSmithsonian MagazineHumpback_Whale_underwater_shot ⒸWikimediaheader-bubble-tools @Hakai MagazineDr Fred Sharpe ⒸAlaska Whale FoundationRaven Pro Sound Analysis Software ⒸCornell Lab of OrnithologyHarmonic Waves ⒸWikipediaCosmos ⒸNautilus MagazineAWF logo ⒸAlaska Whale FoundationInforamtional Plaque on Voyager I ⒸNASABill Watkins at his desk in WHOI ⒸWoods Hole Oceanographic InstitutionPioneer I & II Plaque ⒸWikimediaPreviousNext"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."Albert Einsteinwas a German-born theoretical physicist widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics."Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."Marcus Aureliuswas Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calmness and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD."Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens."Khalil Gibranwas a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title.[5] He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time."Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new."Og Mandinowas an American author. He wrote the bestselling book The Greatest Salesman in the World. His books have sold over 50 million copies and have been translated into over 25 languages. He was the president of Success Unlimited magazine until 1976 and was inducted into the National Speakers Association's Hall of Fame."When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order."Meister Eckhartwas a German Catholic theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha in the Landgraviate of Thuringia (now central Germany) in the Holy Roman Empire."You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations."Zig Ziglarwas an American author, salesman, and motivational speaker."Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don't know how to manage it.."Lady GagaStefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress known for her image reinventions and musical versatility. "Individuals need to be willing to face truth about their attitudes, behaviors, even what we want out of life."Joyce Meyeris an American Charismatic Christian author, speaker, and president of Joyce Meyer Ministries. "The dream doesn't lie in victimization or blame; it lies in hard work, determination and a good education."Alphonso Jacksonserved as the 13th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He was nominated by President George W. Bush on August 28, 2004, and confirmed by the Senate on August 31, 2004.PreviousNextOriginal Tale-TellerLisa Mitchell was a student at Seacamp on Big Pine Key, where she first learned to skin-dive. She went on to become a certified diver, then a SCUBA-Instructor for three diver-certification organizations. Taking a break from college, she went to work as a Dolphin Trainer at Flipper’s Sea School On Grassy Key, Florida. Lisa has owned and operated several Dive-Excursion companies from Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles to Tortola in The British Virgin Islands, and is still an active member of the SCUBA-diving industry, along with a host of conservation efforts around the world.Waylaid By Whale-SongAs a Naturalist trained in the interpretive style of Freeman Tilden, the father of Interpretation and architect of the field-education approach be devised for our National Park Service, I try not to assume anything about the people I am escorting into the great outdoors. Since each person brings their own experience to the expedition, the hardest part of the job is figuring out how to best reach each person in the group rather than giving a aggregated lecture while walking among the trees or delivering pedantic information-laden speeches from the deck of a boat.But it's hard not to assume that everyone came to have a good time. While immersed in what I call "the outside", despite each us harboring our own personal expectation of what we hope to experience out there you never really know why any of them came. Or how to make each person's experience better by adding some personally relevant perspective.Because there's always that one person in every group that seems more inclined to disappointment than delight. It's a sad thing for them, often a wearisome drag on the rest of the group, and usually a bit off-putting for the field-guide.But, as in this case, there's always the hope that a valuable lesson can been learned along the way. Hope springs eternal, eh?Such was the case on one fine winter day I spent leading a SCUBA-diving expedition in The British Virgin Islands.I was the appointed Naturalist for a group of ten marine-science students from all over the world. Along with a boat captain and two other experienced dive-instructors, we planned both morning and afternoon dives. With two dives scheduled in one day we knew we had to avoid sites deeper than 40-feet to preclude any possibility of decompression sickness.While SCUBA-diving is not particularly dangerous, the laws of physics are at work when surface air is compressed into tanks then metabolized by our bodies at depth. The law of partial-pressures, Boyle's Law, forces us to pay attention to both how deep we dive and the time we spend at those depths in order to avoid some serious health issues later on. Too much bottom time at any depth greater than 33 feet, one atmosphere of pressure, one atmosphere of pressure added every 33 feet, the risk is the bloodstream absorbing too much nitrogen too fast, causing one's "blood to boil", so to speak when you eventually come back up to surface pressure. These bubbles of absorbed nitrogen bubble out of solution, which results in "the bends" or "the rapture of the deep" as it is sometimes called.Dive-tables have been built prescribing the safe time and depths that can be endured with having to undergo what's called "decompression". which involves hanging out at specific depths for prescribed periods of time. It's boring, limits bottom time since we can only carry so much air in our tanks, and usually unnecessary given the nature of light's capacity to penetrate the ocean.Most of the interesting things to see while SCUBA-diving live in less than 60 feet of water anyway. And the deeper we dive, the less surface light penetrates making for low-visibility and lousy photographs. So we chose our dive-sites where we could amass 2 full hours of bottom-time at no more than 40-feet in 2 dives across a 6-hour day. One locale we were all familiar with afforded two good shallow-water dive-sites, both under 40 feet. And we were in luck because, the day before, a number of other dive-boats at this particular set of reefs reported hearing songs from nearby humpback whales that had recently migrated to the area for mating and birthing season. What a treat.The songs of Humpback Whales, in particular, are a rare experience for us underwater.Way back in 1970 it was this very same species of whale whose songs, first recorded by the US Navy listening underwater for any evidence of the Cold-War's Russian submarines, were published by Roger Payne in an album called "Songs of the Humpback Whale".By 1967 he and several colleagues had discovered the complex sonic arrangements performed by male humpback whales during the breeding season, publishing their findings in an article named "Songs of Humpback Whales" in 1971. Here's how he described those first days of discovery; "In 1966, some of us at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution heard about the whale recordings of Frank Watlington, a Navy engineer who eight years earlier had captured eerie underwater moaning and wailing sounds while manning a top-secret hydrophone station off the coast of Bermuda, listening for Russian submarines. I asked for and received copies of the recordings, and soon found that the songs repeated themselves. The shortest songs were about six minutes long, and the longest were over 30 minutes. They could be repeated continuously for up to 24 hours. When the sounds were graphed they displayed a definite structure."

Smitten with the beauty of these songs and the story they told about the hidden life of whales, Payne published a record-album he also called "Songs of the Humpback Whale" that was enthusiastically consumed by the world's public. An instant global hit, their songs captivated a world eager to learn more about how intelligent and culturally-aware whales are. So influential, these whale-songs inspired legislation by the US Congress who passed The Marine Mammal Protection Act the very next year. His work helped the global "Save the Whales" movement gain momentum for putting an end to commercial whaling, which by this time had pushed many species dangerously close to extinction simply to supply an over-consuming world more fertilizer and dog-food. Commercial whaling was finally banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986, mostly as a function of the influence of this one article and compelling audio.We decided it was prudent to prepare our divers for the rare and exciting experience. So we annotated some underwater-slates for our divers to use with our dive plan containing notes about what to look (and listen) for during the dive. While we might have seen some spectacular breeching from the boat deck that often accompany these whale-songs, none of us expected to see any of these singing humpback whales while we were underwater. But we were concerned that some of our less experienced students might. And then they'd be disappointed later when a great dive replete with whale-song was less than they'd imagined by having anticipated seeing something that the nature of underwater visibility makes almost impossible without swimming far too close these 50-foot-long, 30-ton giants.And that unfortunate outcome would solely be due to of a glaring lack of proper preparation on our part. So our underwater slates contained some informational factoids to help our divers appreciate and document the experience. Like…* + - * + the humpback whale songs would be coming from males, only. + an individual song can last up to 30 minutes and be repeated every 24 hours, so divers might hear the same song two days in a row if the timing is right, maybe even twice in the same dive. + the typical sound units that comprise these songs, all a bit anthropomorphic; cry, moan, groan, shriek, gurgle, grunt, purr, bark, trill, violin, siren, screech, sigh, and even grumble to name a few.

It was a science-diving expedition, after all, so underwater data-collection was the order of the day. The slates would prepare them as well as allowing them to collect data like the length of the songs they heard, whether any stanzas were repeated, and the number and type of known sounds they heard. As prepared as we could be, or so we thought, the dive-trip started out like they all do; a semi-organized, semi-chaotic bustle of activity getting all the gear stowed safely aboard for the unpredictable 45-minute trip across open ocean water.Filled with air compressed to 2,200 pounds per square inch, SCUBA-tanks must be treated carefully, stowed just right, and are generally rented from the dive-operator. The rest of the gear like masks-fins-snorkels, buoyancy-compensators, wetsuits, dive watches, regulators, and depth-gauges can also be rented but are often the divers' personal property.Especially among the more experienced divers, who tend to prefer using their own gear, often of higher quality than rented fare. This makes the Divemaster's job more difficult. And the more disorganized the group is, the more time it takes to get through the check-list so the boat can cast off.Everything was going well until one diver showed up right before we left the dock. She'd overslept and no one in the group had noticed her absence, a fact we understood quite a bit better after the first dive. But began to figure out quite quickly as she kept us all waiting with her snarky approach to accounting for and stowing all her gear while the rest of us watched.Finally underway, the boat-chatter was typical. Meaning not much of it. When the dive-boat's twin diesels are cranking conversation is difficult, which makes the pre-dive prep at the dock such an important part of every well-run dive. Especially since, once on location, everyone is anxious to "get down" as the saying goes.After we were safely anchored, the on-board bustle began in reverse as everyone hurried to gear up and get in the water. As the Naturalist it was my job to stay on board while the dive-instructors handled all the diving-safety aspects underwater. That time would allow me to help everyone get their gear arrayed correctly, buddy-up, and disembark safely. Then I'd hop in to take a leisurely snorkel around the boat to make a quick assay of the interesting biota in area.After a few minutes I'd climb back aboard and prepare a bit of a lecture about the natural history of the area. More of a Q&A session, this approach allows the group to discuss what they'd seen and ask questions about things they were unfamiliar with or had never seen before.That day's discussion was easy to anticipate because I heard whale-songs as soon as I submerged. In fact, I heard them coming through the hull of the boat before I even got in the water. The first diver back onboard was the late-comer. Duly prepared to answer questions, she didn't emerge with the typically breathlessness about what she'd seen.What she climbed aboard with was a bad-attitude and series of long, whiny complaints."You need to get all your cheap rental-regulators fixed. All I could hear the whole dive was squeaks and clicks and rumbles from everyone's regulator. Thats why I bought my own regulator. years ago. It ruined the dive for me!" Confused at first, I don't know quite what to say. I admit to feeling some anger as well. I'd heard the same underwater concert myself minutes earlier, and suspected what she'd mistaken for the sounds of other people's "cheaper" equipment-malfunctions were the very whale-songs her late-arrival had prevented her from hearing about before the dive.Mercifully, the other divers were beginning to surface, climb aboard, and chatter excitedly among themselves about the whale-songs. As they took their gear off and readied it for the afternoon dive, it soon became apparent to everyone that the only unhappy diver was our still disgruntled late-comer.The raised-eyebrows and knowing looks exchanged by the rest of the group as she complained to them about their regulator-noise told me all I needed to know. Usually an unwelcome social-dynamic, their unspoken peer-pressure of disapproval and dismissal came to my rescue. The group's reaction relieved me of telling her off for her lousy attitude. Which was likely far more effective as well since I was both a stranger and the hired-help, to boot.The truth, as everyone but her clearly understood, was that by coming late she was essentially unprepared for the delights of diving amid the songs sung by Humpback Whales seeking mates. And, as just such an unprepared diver, she'd managed to turn a unique and potentially wonderful experience into yet another mundane, daily vexation.And, worse, was now trying to do the same thing to us by blaming the rest of the group for her ruined dive.But she got the message from her cohorts pretty quickly. It all worked out in the end. Because when she emerged from the afternoon dive her attitude and demeanor were quite different. Excited, enthused, engaged. What had seemed like noise to her that morning had become a lesson in the wonder of whale-song just two hours later.I've often wondered if that was a telling learning moment for her. It was clear that she "got it" that day. Whether or not she managed to work that day's lesson of "preparation as attitude" into the rest of her life remains a mystery. I like to think she did.Field-Guides routinely meet and become fairly intimate with lots of different people in a matter of hours, most of whom they'll never see again. It's part of human nature to believe in what we do, to think of our best intentions as automatically manifesting within everyone we help get the most out of their experience amid the splendid mysteries of the natural world.It's disconcerting to hear myself project such a presumptuous opinion on her all these years later. It's a telling lesson about how easy it is to look for and find external reasons that an accounting of our internal feelings might explain much better.I always get raised eyebrows when I tell people that "teaching is easy". Until I go on to say "Figuring out what we taught is hard!"In the same way, there's a hidden truth in this story as well. That I was at least partially responsible for her tragically wasted first dive.As the Shipboard Naturalist I should have made sure that her late arrival didn't preclude her getting a proper pre-dive briefing. I could have noticed that she forgot to take along one of our prepared underwater slates. Which would have prepared her to hear whales communicating rather than squeaky regulators.But, consumed with my own obsession about staying on schedule, I was more miffed at her delaying our departure than dedicated to making her experience as fulfilling as possible.The privilege of interpreting group forays into the natural world constantly reminds me of the teachings of Confucius, who reminded us all that…"Training Is Endless."

Current research is still trying to figure out if these whales' winter whale-songs and summertime communications are invitations to dinner, proposals to mate, or warnings to rivals to stay away. Or, perhaps, much like us, have discovered that making music is a cognitively divined way to celebrate beauty, cultivate personal peace of mind, and simply taking pleasure in the expression of our creative selves.It's become clear, however, that across all four seasons whale-song is a confusing mix of long-distance communication made even more maddening confusing for us to understand when we consider the long-distance these songs can travel.What might have been transmitted as good news about a fertile but fleetingly brief feeding opportunity or a current state of estrous can end up as a kind of cetacean campfire story about a long-lost opportunity to share a good feast or chance to mate by the time it gets to another whale's ears.Having become an adept information-theorist as well as a 30-year veteran of Humpback Whale research, Dr. Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation also works with SETI in Mountainview California, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He's helping them deal with this very same consternating aspect of whale-song when it comes to recognizing the "earmarks" of an extraterrestrial language, a first critical step in the even more complicated next step; trying to understand what information such a message carries.How to reconcile the lost relevance of information transmitted when the distance that message must travel renders it moot once it's been heard?Considering that a Humpback Whale's communication can travel for days across an oceanic expanse spanning Alaska and Japan, how could a Humpback's "song" from Alaska traveling about 1,500 meters per second about a feeding event or onset of estrous be even remotely relevant when heard by another whale in Japan some 58 minutes later, since it would take that same whale nearly 16 days to swim between the two sites at their top estimated migration speed of 9 miles per day?This, then, begs the question "Why would whales need to have such big voices?" if the messages weren't meant to travel that far? If conveying news that only a whale within a few miles, a few "ear-lengths" away, could benefit from hearing, why have a voice so big it can be heard by cohorts too far away to benefit for its information?If evolution has taught us anything it's that physical traits that don't directly, or even indirectly effect an organism's survival won't last only in the expressed genome. The same information-relevance problem besets those SETI researchers as well. Actually, all linguists, information-scientists, and acousticians who study sound in order to better understand the meaning that made the delivery of that message so critical in the first place. Promixa Centauri, Earth's closest star in the southern constellation Centaurus, is 4.2 light years away from us. Sent via our fastest communication technology, electromagnetic waves broadcasting their signals at a rate of at 300-million meters per second, would reach any planet capable of harboring intelligent life there ~3,246 years to get there.Even if some extraterrestrial civilization existed there, and had managed to develop much more advanced technology than ours capable of transmitting information at the speed of light, what we think of as the fastest speed possible in the universe, their quickest reply wouldn't come for another 4.2 years some 3,250 years after we sent it.Would anyone who heard it back here on Earth even remember that we sent such a message, or what we said if we did?And what information would we send in such a message were we to try to do so in the first place? What relevant information could we possibly convey about the human condition with that kind of delay between us and our closest potential neighbor?Perhaps the real lesson in this entire underwater-episode where that confusion of "noisy vexation" and "enchanting wonder" occurred is that "a song is never just is a song". That nothing, when seriously contemplated for meaning, is what it appears to be at first.That meaning, understanding, hence any chance at actual wisdom, comes from the way we experience life and not our fleetingly flimsy attempts to explain it at the time. If so, then in that same way our disgruntled diver can be seen as a bridge between the seeming infinity that separates another pain-in-the-ass tourist from a resounding success-story in the annals of Field Guides."Chance favors the prepared mind" was one of Louis Pasteur's most famous quotes.Indeed. His keen insight underscores how this incredible day of diving afforded us a unique opportunity to learn that lesson in several different and resoundingly profound ways.I can only hope that we all did.

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How Can This Go With That?Henry David Thoreau ⒸPDwalden-and-civil-disobedience ⒸSimonAndSchusterWalden Thoreau ⒸPDA Sand County Almanac ⒸWikipediaThink Like A Mountain ⒸPenguinBooksRachel Carson ⒸPDSilent Spring ⒸFairUseAnimated_Seagulls_Love_French_Fries_Ad ⒸSecondLifeMarketplaceOsprey-Whitehaven-MD ⒸGoNomadThe Marine Mammal CenterⒸYMMCDeer sat-lick ⒸTractorSupplyprairie-dog-shooting-IMG_0600 ⒸBuffaloButtranchclemson_carbonworkshopimage ⒸAudubon Society of South CarolinaBenButterworth_Rider_LookingWest2 ⒸQCTrailsThoreau Fishing ⒸBrandywine River Museum of Art, Annenberg Research Center NC Wyeth CollectionAldo Leopold and Starker making fire at campsite ⒸUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison17_rc_nauplius_web_2016wm ⒸRachelCarsonCouncilPreviousNext"Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them."Orson Welleswas an American director, actor, producer, and screenwriter who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."Douglas Adamswas an English author and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. "The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be."George Santayanawas a Spanish and American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist."Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students."Paulo Freirewas a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction."Georges Bataillewas a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art., whose work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism."Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."Blaise Pascalwas a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer."When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."Simone Weilwas a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Over 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work, since 1995"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory."Alfred North Whiteheadwas an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy,"I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell."Kim ElizabethElizabeth Kim is the pen name of an American journalist who authored the book Ten Thousand Sorrows, which is described as a memoir."What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth."Roland Bartheswas a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture."Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future."Gary Rossis an American film director, writer, and producer. He is best known for writing and directing the fantasy comedy-drama film Pleasantville (1998), the sports drama film Seabiscuit (2003), the sci-fi action film The Hunger Games (2012), and the heist comedy film Ocean's 8"It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved."Herbert Readwas an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. "Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive."Peter Landesmanis an American screenwriter, film director, producer, journalist, novelist and painter. He wrote a number of cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and others,.PreviousNext How Can This Go With That?

I'll never forget my first trip to Key West. it wasn't a spring-break trip to go party and get a tan after a cold Illinois winter. Nor was it a SCUBA check-out dive, like the kind I took to Vero Beach the summer before when I was working as a lifeguard at Walt Disney World.

This was a work-crew I took with two recent PhD biologists to pick up some microscopes, reagents, and other scientific laboratory equipment for the marine science summer program where I had just been hired as a Marine Science Instructor.

One was a fisheries and coral-reef biologist, the other an expert in crustaceans and marine ecology. Although we'd met just a week before both were soon to become my trainers, mentors, and lifelong friends. Birds of a feather flock together, eh?

They'd ordered everything weeks before from the Sears & Roebuck catalog, and we got the phone-call it had all arrived that very morning. So we hopped in the camp pick-ip trick and drove 30 miles down the Overseas Highway to Key West from Big Pine Key. The pick-up kiosk was actually just the Sear's loading-dock located n an unnamed strip-mall everyone just called Sears-Town. It was right on US 1, situated on the north side of the island, right at the shoreline of Garrison Bight. The southern route was more famous, the A!A, the name of Jimmy Buffet's most popular album at the time.

Back then it was almost the first commercial property you got to when driving into Key West. Along with Sears was the State of Florida's obligatory Winn-Dixie grocery store, an extremely hot and crowded laundromat I became quite familiar with over the next 7 years, and the most decrepit (and sadly busiest) liquor store in Monroe County.

It also had a restaurant I later learned served delicious Cuban food that tasted like it have been prepared in Havana just that morning, which was only 60 miles to the southwest but about a century behind us, I wanted to eat there, but when I suggested it they raised their eyebrows at one another and said "Dream on, pal!"

Since we were all dirt-poor biologists, both of them recently married and me living in a 4-man tent on Big Pine Key, after doing our laundry and loading the pickup with a summer's worth of lab-supplies, our lunch plans turned out to be McDonald's, where we could revel in the cheap deliciousness their greasy fast-food after a week of summer-camp fare; government-surplus grits, rice, beans, cheese, peanut-butter, apple-sauce, and mystery meat cutlets.

We ate outside looking at the sub-tropical beauty of Florida bay, the mangrove island dotted wilderness that stretched all the way up 10,000 Islands area and eventually, Everglades National Park.

it was like a dream come true, working as a biologist with my two-week old Bachelor's degree in Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution in the company of two older cohorts living the life I'd dreamed of as a National Geographic subscribing school-boy who'd grown up on a steady television diet of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, Flipper, Sea Hunt, and Johnny Quest.

Both the EPA and Earth Day had been founded in 1970, my freshman year in high-school. And having attained the rank of Life Scout in the Boy Scouts of America had earned merit badges in Nature, Conservation, Stalking, Orienteering, Forestry, and Ornithology, I considered myself to be on the vanguard of America's emerging #SaveTheEarth lifestyle.

Which explains my initial shock when I saw my two new Biologist friends gleefully feeding the seagulls french-fries. They'd swoop down and catch them in their beaks on the fly. the overhead porch roof keeping them from swarming us like we were in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's famous horror movie, The Birds, filmed in Bodega Bay California.

Equally shocking, however, was my quick departure from all that conservation training to delight in feeding those gulls the worst possible food for their near 15-million year lifestyle as carnivores, mostly fish-eaters and marine-carrion scavengers.

Later, when I asked them both how they reconciled their training with such behavior, they essentially told me to "lighten up".

"Have some fun," they said, "because this summer you are going to work harder than you ever have before teaching our students 'To Observe, Not Disturb". Which was our year-round marine biology institute's founding motto.

That was nearly 50 years ago now, and they were right. I needed a dose of the real world after 16 straight years of academia. Since then I've gained some perspective by reading the great American conservationists, authors and their works like;

- Thoreau's "Walden, or Life In The Woods" and "Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays"
- Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" and "Think Like A Mountain"
- Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and "Man's War Against Nature"

As well as studying their actual everyday lives.

It turns out that Thoreau fed himself by fishing and hunting. Aldo Leopold sat around smoke-belching campfires his entire life, and Rachel Carson sped around Long Island Sound, the Everglades, and the Florida Keys doing her research on skiffs running on the most air and water polluting two-cycle engines ever invented.

The fact is that, regardless of our activism, we live in the real world. And as much as we'd like to believe, even strive to "leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures", none of us has ever managed that trick in real life.

How does one conflicting activity go with another? How do we reconcile flying to an international meeting on curbing #AnthropogenicClimateChange and flying there and back on an ozone-destroying transoceanic flight?

It's the eternal question human beings are all faced with in life. How to aspire to an ideal while slogging through the reality of our less than aspirational daily lives?

- two former tropical-fish collectors I know eventually gave it up as a profession. One started and still runs a non-profit coral-restoration foundation while the other is a regional director of a National Marine Sanctuary Program for NOAA.
- an longtime colleague who is a famous wildlife photographer and back-country kayaking outfitter routinely shoots pellets at the mast of his sailing catamaran to scare off ospreys who like perching atop his mast because they'd drop fish-guts, scales, and fishy bird-shit all over his decks.
- a City-Councilwoman in my hometown helped build a river walk along miles of Mississippi River shoreline to help the community partake of its natural beauty while stopping the former erosion decades of river-walkers had caused. Then, to help pay for its maintenance, arranged for the installation of coin-operated corn-and-grain-dispensing machines so the people can feed the local ducks, geese, and squirrels.
- a friend who owns a native Slash-Pine tree-farm in Central Florida also plants fruit-trees and places salt-licks on his property so he can bow-hunt the deer who come there to partake of it all.
- a family-friend and former engineer on the Alaska Oil Pipeline now lives on an island in the Puget Sound trading carbon-credits to help preserve what's left of the virgin forest there.
- a marine mammal hospital center I volunteer at makes its own salt-water from the San Francisco Bay area's limited fresh-water supply for the tanks it uses to hose its seal, sea-lion, sea-otter, and dolphin patients instead of using local sea-water available from the nearby coast.
- local prairie-dog shooting contests are now popular annual affairs in the American West, based on the claim that their burrows are a prime cause of broken legs to their horses and cattle when, in reality, no one has ever legally-documented such an accident while science has proven that the grass around their burrows is far more nutritious and resistant to grazing-damage than the grass growing in their absence.
- the marine biology institute I worked used plastic utensils on paper plates at every meal because fresh-water for doing all those dishes was simply not available.
- almost everyone I know who has maintained a wintertime bird-feeder, including my dear gentle father, has ended up waging a simultaneous war against the squirrels.
- and I once gleefully fed french-fries to carnivorous fish-eating sea-gulls from a McDonald's that had no business being located that near the water, in fact was convicted years later for pouring decades worth of raw sewage directly into the ocean not 10 feet from its back-deck.

I think about these blatantly conflicting contradictions from time to time, usually right before I go to sleep at might. And, each time, end up rolling over and sleeping like a baby, my former concern about my own duplicity disappearing as my human needs take over for my human concerns.

How does this go with that? I don't know. But they do. And will continue to do so.

I guess the important thing is to continue to think about them, despite the seeming futility in reconciling them. Perfection is an illusion. Especially when seeking it in human systems.

Confucius was right when he taught…

Training Is Endless.

So I'll keep on thinking about it in hopes of finding synergy in all my activities. And, until then, take my friends' advice.

"Lighten up, pal!"

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Like Sands Through The Hourglass Loggerhead_sea_turtle ⒸCC BY 2.0Wallace J. Nichols (right) and Jeffrey Seminoff release an adult female hawksbill sea turtle with a satellite transmitter in El SalvadorⒸNational GeographicSEEturtles ⒸWallaceJNicholsSea Turtle Nest ⒸNewport Aquariumsea turtle hatchlings head ofr the sea Ⓒ Julian Wiskemann:Shutterstocksea turtle hatchlings head ofr the sea Ⓒ Julian Wiskemann:Shutterstocksea turtle hatchling ⒸIsabelle Kuehn:ShutterstockBaby Green Turtle (Chelonia mydas) hatchling breaking out of its egg in Mapo Beach, French Guiana ⒸWWFloggerhead_turtle_and_satellite_tag_2009_jimabernethyleatherback turtle ⒸWikimediaHawksbill Turtles ©Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative (ICAPO)Green Turtle ⒸCC BY-SA 3.0Leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), hatchlings going to sea. French GuianaAdelita voyage track ⒸWallacejNichoolsAdelitac last known position ⒸWallaceJNicholsArchie_Carr_National_Wildlife_Refuge ⒸCC BY-SA 3.0olive ridley turtle ⒸWWFLeatherback_sea_turtle ⒸPDPreviousNext"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."William Blakewas an English poet, painter, and printmaker, largely unrecognized during his life and now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. "The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."Niccolo Machiavellioccasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel, was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince (Il Principe)"Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity."Oscar Wildewas an Irish poet and playwright best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46."Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."Jorge Luis Borgeswas an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph) are collections of short stories exploring themes of dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology"It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the grain of sand in your shoe."Robert W. Servicewas a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", "They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon."Edward Learwas an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised."If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge."JohnNapoleon HillDoewas an American self-help author. He is best known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937), which is among the best-selling self-help books of all time."We all have hourglass figures; your sand just settles in different places."Octavia Spenceris an American actress, the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, making her one of two women of color to have received three Oscar nominations"I love the sea's sounds and the way it reflects the sky. The colours that shimmer across its surface are unbelievable. This, combined with the colour of the water over white sand, surprises me every time."John Dyerwas a painter and Welsh poet who became a priest in the Church of Englan, most recognised for Grongar Hill, one of six early poems featured in a 1726 miscellany. "On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings."Erma Bombeckwas an American humorist who achieved great popularity for her newspaper humor column describing suburban home life, syndicated from 1965 to 1996 and published 15 books, most of which became bestsellers."What was incredible about the Maldives was that the entire island we were on consisted of sand. There didn't seem to be any dirt. You could walk around for hours barefoot with your white trousers skimming the ground, and they'd still be pristine white."KT Tunstallis a Scottish singer-songwriter and musician. She first gained attention with a 2004 live solo performance of her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland."He behaved like an ostrich and put his head in the sand, thereby exposing his thinking parts."George Carmanwas an English leading barrister during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1979, he successfully defended the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe after he was charged with conspiracy to murder."I dig in the sand, and I play with pretty pictures, so I never really left kindergarten."Sarah Parcakis an American archaeologist and Egyptologist,[2] who has used satellite imagery to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, Rome and elsewhere in the former Roman Empire and a professor of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham."On a sea floor that looks like a sandy mud bottom, that at first glance might appear to be sand and mud, when you look closely and sit there as I do for a while and just wait, all sorts of creatures show themselves, with little heads popping out of the sand. It is a metropolis."is an American marine biologist, oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer. She has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence since 1998CEO"I typically enjoy a beautiful beach destination, as I find the water and sand to be the most replenishing."Elizabeth Berkleyis an American actress. She played Jessie Spano in the television series Saved by the Bell and Nomi Malone/Polly Ann Costello in the 1995 Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls. "Try to be like the turtle - at ease in your own shell."Bill Copelandwas an American poet, writer and historian who earned his master's degree in rehabilitation counseling from the University of Georgia. "For most of the wild things on earth the future must depend upon the conscience of mankind. It is not too late to ensure a future for sea turtles."Dr. Archie Carrwas a scientist and author who almost singlehandedly began to turn the tide on the extinction of sea turtles when he wrote The Windward Road, which first alerted the world to the plight of sea turtles, serving as Scientific Director of Sea Turtle Conservancy from 1959 until his death in 1987.PreviousNextKristie Seaman-Anders has worked her entire 40-year career as an Environmental Education specialist. With a BA degree in EE from Penn State University she has plied her craft up and down America’s Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to the Florida Keys at the National Park Service at Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor ME, JN 'Ding Darling' National Wildlife Refuge on Captiva Island FL, and The Newfound Harbor Marine Institute at Seacamp Association on Big Pine Key FL. A specialist in Ornithology, Herpetology, and Astronomy she is a lifetime sailor, seasoned instructor, and tireless activist for conservation.

Like Sands Through The HourglassI've heard it said that "time flies when you're having fun". In my experience, however, time flies no matter how we feel about it. And if you were to ask a sea-turtle about their take on the passage of time, the answer would likely be quite different.Because sea-turtles have been around a long, long time. They evolved from land and freshwater turtles that lived about 230 million years ago in the Triassic period. And even though our modern turtle species changed since then, they represent a well-adapted species that survived through the last ice age while others, like the dinosaurs, did not.Sea-turtles, it appears, show how they feel about time solely by their behavior at that very moment; time to eat, time to mate, time to swim across the ocean to lay eggs. Time to eat. Time to mate again. Time to swim across that same ocean to lay eggs on familiar beaches lining the coast of an entirely different continent.In 1996 my friend Dr. Wallace "J" Nichols proved, while working on his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, that sea-turtles thought to be strictly Mexican were also Japanese. He accomplished this with the help of a Loggerhead Turtle he called "Adelita", namesake of a heroine of the Mexican Revolution. Her trip from Baja, Mexico to Sendai Japan took 367 days.Since then "J", his students, local fishermen, and #SEETurtle conservationists have tracked over 50 Loggerhead Turtles between the mating and egg-laying beaches of Mexico and Japan. Despite long-held science teaching that sea-turtles always return to the same beaches to lay their eggs, no one had taken the time to research the fact that they do so in alternating years, on the same beaches along the coast of entirely different continents separated by 7,000 miles of Pacific Ocean.Time, it would seem then, apparently means only one thing to a sea-turtle; "it's time to get to work".That's true of my friend Kristie, too, a former National Park Ranger, Marine Science Instructor, and lifetime sea-turtle enthusiast. It's been decades since she first decided to spend her precious free time observing, monitoring, and protecting the nesting sites of egg-laying sea-turtles. And Florida is a great place to do so.The Northwest Atlantic Ocean’s loggerhead nesting aggregation, for example, is considered to be the largest in the world, with Florida hosting approximately 90 percent of the nests associated with this aggregation. The majority of this nesting takes place in just five counties on the east coast of Florida, representing approximately 20 percent (160 miles) of the nearly 835 miles of beach in Florida where sea turtle nesting activity is monitored. In keeping with her lifetime avocation, every year she visits the most likely beaches along Florida's east coast with her husband "Red" to be a witness to the annual spectacle of female sea-turtles making the difficult last leg of an already arduous transoceanic journey. Who return to the beaches of their birth to lay their own brood of eggs.In Florida, those sea-turtles come in 5 varieties; Loggerhead, Green, and Leatherback being most common, while Kemp's Ridley and Hawksbill turtles also nest there in very small numbers. While occurring annually, each female nests every two to three years. After digging a hole and depositing about 80-120 eggs, the females fill in the hole with sand and camouflage the nest before returning to the sea. A dedicated conservationist keenly aware that her own presence could alter this epochs-long cycle of reproduction, these two sea-turtle citizen-scientists would sit quietly in the dark under the star-filled night sky to listen for the sound of huffing-and-puffing sea-turtles making their way out of the water.Apparently, it isn't easy to haul your aquatically-efficient body up the sandy dune far enough to reach sand that is thermally-sufficient enough to safely and reliably incubate your eggs. Not to mention using fins adapted mostly as swimming-paddles to dig a hole large enough to hold up to 200 eggs.Their future offspring are left to start their lives in a similarly arduous reverse-journey. They are born some two months later capable of fending for themselves, their first trip out of the nesting hole taking them down the same open stretch of beach patrolled by hungry hawks, gulls, eagles, and coyotes on land to get to an ocean filled with equally ravenous alligators, crocodiles, and sharks.They go there to document the location of the nest and estimate the number of eggs laid by timing the process by counting the number of "back-arching" pushes she makes to expel several eggs at a time. Keenly aware of Heisenberg's "Observer Effect", a warning that the act of observing a system can influence what is being observed, they wait patiently high up on the dune as she heads for sand suitable for the safe incubation of those eggs.Once the digging starts the Loggerhead Turtle goes into a sort of 'trance", becoming singularly engaged in her egg-laying duties. So they wait until the sounds of digging start. Her digging must start in earnest before they dare to get near enough to document the process.When finally situated close enough to ensure an accurate count, they were soon covered by clouds of flying sand as the mother sea-turtle furiously dug her way to what she somehow knew to be "the right depth". Depending on the species, size of the mother, and local conditions such a nest can be up to 4-feet deep and nearly 10-feet wide.That requires moving a lot of sand. Steadfast in their duties, they soon found themselves to be, essentially, "buried alive". Resolute to the end, they stuck it out to observe and collect data about the egg-laying in silence, not moving or even talking until they finally heard her lumber off and re-enter the ocean.They quickly dug themselves out, recorded the exact location with their GPS device, then returned to the steps leading to the beach to wait for another sea-turtle to arrive. the cycle likely to starting up again soon.After a long night, dawn finally came and they dusted themselves off and headed to their car. Their nocturnal shift complete, they prepared to get some daytime-sleep once they made it to their beachfront motel.Which wasn't easy since the flying sand from all the flurried nest-digging they monitored had not just covered them, it had infiltrated every nook-and-cranny of their bodies, which every beach-goer soon discovers is the natural consequence of any time spent on the sand.Once their scheduled-shifts were completed they headed home to Florida's southwest tip. Where it took them a few days to completely rid themselves of all the hidden sand from their hair, pockets, sweatshirt-hoods, pants cuffs, and the most sensitive parts of their anatomy.Naturalists have long braved the elements in order to learn more about the natural world. It's the price mother-natures levies for the privilege of getting to do such important work for a living. But some of us have paid a price far higher than a bit of temporary discomfort from sand in our ears and sorely chafed butt-cracks.George Adamson, a British wildlife conservationist and author best known through the book and movie "Born Free", was shot dead by Somali bandits in 1989 at the age 83 while working in Kenya’s Kora National Park.David Alexander Johnston was a United States Geological Survey volcanologist who was killed by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens while manning an observation post six miles away just moments after transmitting "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!" before being swept away by the lateral blast.Francis Birtwell, an ornithologist from Boston, was strangled to death in 1901 by his climbing rope as his bride of one-month looked on while he was attempting to collect a bird nest on the Rio Pecos in New Mexico during their honeymoon.Carl Hunstein, a German natural history specimen collector specializing in birds and plants, who discovered the Blue Bird of Paradise, was killed at the age of 45 in a tsunami caused when Ritter Island volcano off the western end of New Britain collapsed and disappeared beneath the sea. Kirsty M. Brown, a 29 year-old marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, drowned in 2003 when she was attacked while snorkeling and dragged 200 feet underwater by a leopard seal.Heinrich Macklot, was a naturalist who became so enraged when insurgents burned down his house, with all of his collections, that he organized a revenge attack and was speared to death at the age of 33 in Java in 1782.Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife ecology who helped found The Wildlife Society and the Wilderness Society, died of a heart attack in 1948, age 61, while battling a wildfire on his neighbor’s property.Gaius, aka Pliny The Elder, was a Roman naturalist, author of the encyclopedic "Historia Naturalis", died in 79 AD when he was age 56, supposedly of toxic fumes when he got too close during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. For my part, and paling by comparison, I was forced to live in a platform-tent for 6 months next to a mosquito-infested mangrove shoreline in the heat of the sub-tropical Florida Keys. And one summer I contracted a near-septic staph-infection after an allergic reaction to fire-coral stings on my knee.And Kristie and Red eventually managed to rid themselves of all that invasive sand, only to repeat that experience a number of times since then, the sea-turtles continuing to return to those same Florida beaches to lay their eggs. Were you to ask any of us how we felt about those times, we'd all likely describe them as "both a blessing and a curse".While all these travails plumbing the depths of natural mystery widely differ in the severity of their outcomes, the world's naturalists all share one thing in common.The capacity, as the English poet William Blake, so eloquently put it in "Auguries of Innocence";"To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower…Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour…He who shall teach the Child to DoubtThe rotting Grave shall ne'er get out…He who respects the Infants faithTriumphs over Hell & Death…God Appears & God is LightTo those poor Souls who dwell in Night…But does a Human Form DisplayTo those who Dwell in Realms of day."

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Fat Or Fur?An_evolutionary_tree_of_mammals Ⓒ Graphodatsky et al Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 GenericSea_Otter_(Enhydra_lutris) ⒸCC BY-SA 2.0Ovibos_moschatus ⒸCC BY-SA 3.0Pigs ⒸWikimedia Commons:Alvesgasparmussel mariculture ⒸNoal Farms YouTubeBang's Island Mussles ⒸBang's Island MusslesBang's Island Mussles II ⒸBang's Island MusslesManatees ⒸCC BY-SA 4.0Hippo ⒸPixabayHumpback Whale and Calf ⒸHakia MagazineHair Follicle ⒸCC BY 3.0adipose_tissue ⒸSteve Gschmeissner:Science Photo Library:Getty Imageselephants seals ⒸWikimedia Commons:AlvesgasparGaur Ⓒ. Wikimedia Commons:PJeganathanCamel ⒸJonah_Photos:iStockCalifornia_sea_lion_in_La_Jolla ⒸCC BY-SA 4.0BrownBear ⒸTin Man Lee : Nature’s Best Photography AwardsBlue Whale ⒸNOAASumo Wrestler ⒸThe Japan TimesPreviousNext"The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.Joseph Joubertwas a French moralist and essayist, remembered today largely for his Pensées (Thoughts), which were published posthumously."Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance."Robert Quillen Doewas an American journalist and humorist who for more than a quarter century was "one of the leading purveyors of village nostalgia" from his home in Fountain Inn, South CarolinaAlways remember that your calmness under fire is your best defense in any argument or discussion."Robert Greeneis an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction.One good analogy is worth three hours discussion."Dudley Field Malonewas an American attorney, politician, liberal activist, and actor, best remembered as one of the most prominent liberal attorneys in the United States during the decade of the 1920s and his unsuccessful 1920 campaign for Governor of New York."Provocative... I used to be defensive about it, but in the end, I realised it's exactly right. It's what we're trying to do - to provoke thought and discussion and, you know, shake people up to start thinking about things in a different way. I'm interested in messing with what they think is the norm.Yorgos Lanthimosis a Greek film director, film producer, screenwriter, photographer, and theatre director. "There are grave misgivings that the discussion on ecology may be designed to distract attention from the problems of war and poverty."JohIndira Gandhin Doewas an Indian politician and a central figure of the Indian National Congress. and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India.CEO“Lying is done with words and also with silence.”"Adrienne Richwas an American poet, essayist and feminist, called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century" and credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse"."“One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before I talk.”Margaret Chase Smithwas an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, she served as a U.S. representative (1940–1949) and a U.S. senator (1949–1973) from Maine."The only certainty is that nothing is certain."Pliny the Elderwas a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian."The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty.is a religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome. The JesuitsTeaching of The Society of Jesus"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."VoltaireFrançois-Marie Arouet was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—especially of the Roman Catholic Church—and of slavery., he as an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state."A lean compromise is better than a fat lawsuit."George Herbertwas an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists.""Surround yourself with a bunch of like-minded people, and you'll soak up their habits like a starved sponge. Fat people with fat friends care less about their weight."Vir Das is a Indian-comedian, actor and musician. "I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness."Kiki Smithis a West German-born American artist[1] whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. "People are more violently opposed"Alexei Sayleto fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. is an English actor, author, stand-up comedian, television presenter and former recording artist. "The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who's got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors.A. A. Gillwas a British journalist, critic, and author. best known for his food and travel writing. "Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?"Jean Paulwas a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.PreviousNextFat or Fur?

A Field-Guide's stock and trade is questions about the natural world. When I was teaching about Marine Mammalogy at K-Dock, a popular haul-out for California Sea Lions since 1989 at Pier 39 in San Francisco, I'd get the same questions over and over every week, even several times a session.

Hardly an indictment of our education system, it's actually testament to the global-similarity inherent to human curiosity about the natural world. Along with the haunting similarity of humanity's overall ignorance of the mechanics at work in Mother Nature.Those repeat-questions came with another shared human quality; the joy of spending time exploring nature under sunny, bright blue skies in the presence of unique and interesting wildlife. Genuinely curious about the unknown, our visitors there were usually open to learning new things, hearing information that was new to them even when it contradicted their current understanding of the natural world.

Until, that is, you run into people who came there with their minds already made up. For them, certain topics are often seen as threats to their belief-system. And what started as a pleasant educational exercise can quickly disintegrate into an unpleasant public argument.

On this particular Saturday afternoon I'd just launched into one of my favorite topics, the "Fat vs. Fur Dilemma", an exercise hoped to inspire critical-thought. It's a great way to introduce the scientific evidence that modern marine-mammals have ancestors who were singularly terrestrial, returning to the sea millions of years ago in response to changes in the Earth's environment.

When these ancient mammals first dipped their toes into the water as a place to hunt, then for some even eventually inhabit full-time, they were forced to deal with the preserving their precious body-heat while immersed in water rather than air. Their body-heat is generated by all the new sources of energy gained by feeding exclusively in the newfound and abundant bounty of resources available to them there.

But heat is conducted away from them 28x faster in water than in the Earth's atmosphere that formally surrounded them. Whatever pressures were being exerted on their continued survival on land, ostensibly the dynamic that ultimately drew them back into the water, none were more pressing or immediate than adapting to the aquatic medium where the laws of physics made their homeostatic nature an immediate and mortal liability. Change was not only inevitable, it was a necessity.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, among the 20th Century's most influential evolutionary-biologists, put it this way;"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

When I cited radiometric-dating as one line of evidence that allowed us to determine the evolutionary timeline of the sea-lions that were basking in the sun right in front of us while relating our current understanding of how their a terrestrial bear-like ancestors first began their transition from land to the sea, they literally howled in group dismay. And that's when when the discussion I had hoped to inspire threatened to turn ugly. Despite being surrounded by about 50 people, a small group among them loudly informed me that "evolution is a hoax".

They imperiously informed me that the Earth was only 9,000 years old, the Garden of Eden was true, all the plants and animals on Earth originated according to the Biblical Genesis story, and today's fauna comprise only those survivors of The Great Flood lucky enough to be included aboard Noah's Ark about 3,000 years ago.

It was clear that I had some seriously "made up" minds confronting me. Experience from teaching science in the field reminds us that it's very difficult to get people to even listen to alternative explanations about anything they have come to accept as "the unmitigated truth".But why should that be surprising to anyone?

Consider the sheer scale of time and distance we all face in this confusing place we call "the universe". We measure it in units of time anchored by the speed of light, a speed already incomprehensible to us, Its immensity dwarfs our imaginations, leaving a gaping hole in our collective understanding that makes most of what we've learned still mostly beyond our collective imaginations no matter how much training we get or wisdom we feel we've acquired.

That's why I'lll never forget the day I found a way back to civil discussion about the natural mysteries of the world we live in once the certainty of belief has declared itself as the unassailable truth. It's only possible by seeking and encouraging inclusion, not exclusion, of all the participants in that inevitable and looming argument.Which, I readily admit, is never easy. Especially after they'd treated me to a group recitation of "the 18,000 year old mussels" story. This tale recounts how fresh mussels just harvested from the ocean were tested, only to reveal a carbon-date of nearly 18,000 year old.

To them, that was a clear demonstration of the sheer the folly in this obviously mistaken theory. "Proof" to them that radiometric-dating is scientifically-flawed since these cultivated mussels could not have been more than 3-years old, as the mariculture firm advertised in their own literature. Which they then used to mistakenly claim that evolution, then, must be wrong as well.

Despite how much detail has been learned and added since Darwin first proposed the theory of Evolution through Natural Selection as the mechanism for how the long-suspected inheritance of all life forms actually works, his original yet seminal explanation is still valid in its simplicity despite much detail being added and refined since 1859;

"If offspring share traits with their parents and siblings; and if the set of traits differ a bit between siblings and between offspring and parent; and if the better set of traits has a greater chance of having offspring of its own, then you will have speciation."

He called this "natural selection" to differentiate it from "artificial selection", which even back then humanity had long since exploited agriculturally to breed "new" plants and animals via "selective breeding"

The same simple explanation is is true of emerging theories within chemistry and physics as well. Today, everyone on Earth consults clocks set to the 8th-generation Cesium-fountain clock operated by the National Institute of Standards & Technology in Boulder, Colorado since 1954. And many purchase their home's electricity from a nearby nuclear power plant fueled by the nuclear-fission of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 pellets.

But few understand the complicated details of partial physics at work. And radiometric dating would not be possible without a deep understanding of nuclear fission. Which has a similarly simple explanation;

"If you compare the presence and ratios of the various radioactive isotopes within a sample to its known abundance on Earth, since their incorporation within any living organism stops at death its known half-life (rate of decay) allows for the accurate calculation of its age."

In the context of marine-mammals these two simple tenets of chemistry and biology, isotopes and evolution, help us question how it is that the ratios of fat and fur in their physical makeup came to be.

Starting over 65-million years ago the ancient, original whales survived to build their place in ecological niches where fat, called blubber in marine-mammals, won out over fur to the extent that one must look hard to discover hair anywhere on or even in their bodies. Blubber for warmth without the speed-killing drag that comes with swimming with fur in the water, an confounding aspect that comes along with being able to catch fish with your teeth while swimming through the water.

Much more recently, perhaps as little as 15-million years ago, the sea-otter (who shares ancestry with the fat-storing and hibernating bears) took their place in coastal marine ecosystems by adapting a 24-7-365 lifestyle of high-metabolism, losing the capacity to store fat while adapting with the warmest and most efficient fur-borne insulation on Earth. Feeding on prey that lives on the ocean-bottom rather than pursuing swift prey through the water column. the trapped air in their fur is what helps insulate them from the cold water.

And then there's the pinnipeds, seals sea-lions and fur-seals, also closely related to bears whose path back to the sea started 25-million years ago. They've evolved to swim at high-rates of speed while toting both blubber and fur along with them to preserve their body-heat in cold ocean water from pole to pole. Blubber for warmth while retaining fur that has adapted a hydrodynamic character that can help preserve warmth while not slowing them down as both predators of smaller fish and prey to the larger sharks and orcas. So, instead of contradicting them, I decided to congratulate them on their skeptical nature, informing them that as a trained scientist I was a skeptic, too. Far from accepting someone's experimental claim in "the written word", I agreed with them that such evidence was, indeed, catastrophically contradictory to the proposed timeframe of evolutionary change the technique claimed to support.They looked shocked, obviously not accustomed to being congratulated for their skepticism.

But that look soon changed from victorious-shock to chagrined resignation when I explained how scientists had long since learned not to use carbon as the preferred element to assay for accurate dating. Especially in either marine and freshwater organisms that feed in shallow water-columns…like mussels. And especially when the timeframes in question transcend millions, of years with such dating require isotopes with much longer half-lives, like Uranium and Argon.

Scientists had long since demonstrated that modern mollusk shells from rivers and the ocean incorporate inactive (meaning carbon-14-deficient) carbon from humus. Probably through the food web, as well as by the pathway of carbon dioxide from humus decay. Which makes the accuracy of radiocarbon-dates of calcium-carbonate fossils span thousands years, with plus or minus thousands of years being the resulting answer. Which clearly could not be the case.

As we've learned more about the past by a more thorough and complete understanding of the laws of physics we now use elements like uranium and argon, whose half-lives span trillions to billions of years to measure the age of fossils.I told them that if they wanted to continue to participate in responsible-skepticism, they were going to have to work much harder to keep up with the latest evidence. Their 18,000 year old mussels having been exposed as moot nearly twenty-five years earlier. I offered them a bit of core-insight about science, skepticism, and the unraveling of long-hidden mysteries in the natural-world;"It's the way of Science that what we think we know at one point eventually gives way to new evidence, more specific information that helps us make even more accurate predictions about the unknown."

"Science", I went on to say, "is then self-correcting". In that way every new result is a correction of a former tenet that wasn't quite right, even though accepted at the time as the best possible explanation. So any discipline predicated on skepticism must ultimately be able to dismiss opinion for evidence. I closed with a pithy maxim that reveals the most basic difference between science and faith;

"Science means never getting to say you're certain".

Everyone seemed to take a collective deep-breath, contemplating their own thoughts instead of loudly pointing out one other's folly. The next few moments were a welcome, quiet, even reflective respite from the ugly public spectacle we'd just managed to avoid.

It wasn't long, however, that our special moment together passed. With little left to say on the subject, they began to move on. But two of them lagged behind, pausing to thank me for the lesson. Actually, what they said was;

"You treated us like friends instead of enemies. Equals instead of inferiors. That's never happened to us before. We really appreciate that."

So off they went. Pleased to have been treated with respect and supplied with a smattering of new information about the evidence for evolution. Sadly, however, their preconceptions had robbed them of the opportunity to hear the second-half of the the #FatOrFur story. The moral of the story, as it were.Because while preserving body-heat was critical, there were multiple new pressures at work in their new aquatic home. Wholly new forms of locomotion were critically required as well. Getting around their new buoyancy-centric world to be able to exploit the rich bounty of the sea was also critical. As carnivores to start with, feeding themselves underwater was on the critical-adaptation list as well.

These newly emerging marine mammals all had major obstacles to overcome in order to survive in their new world besides just preserving that precious body-heat. The very fat-or-fur tradeoffs for preserving the energy they'd ingest from newfound oceanic prey would have dramatic impacts on the manner and speed with which they could hunt. Along with avoiding their own predation by the existing and highly-adapted ocean predators.

From the coastal crocodilians to the blue-water sharks, the ocean had long since been involved in an arms-race of sorts. These well-adapted reptiles and fish had a serious head-start, millions of years of predatory adaptation behind them. The onset of marine-mammalian blubber meant instant an energy gain for these cold-blooded predators as well, making the new marine mammals with that adaptation a favorite prey item on their oceanic menu.

So every risk comes a potential reward. And with every reward comes a potential liability. One change for the better can come at the expense of a host of former beneficial adaptations being exposed as new weakness in the face of such dynamic changes.

Fur can be a very real drag in the water while too much blubber could impede one's progress through the water as well. Having access to so many new sources of energy would be an evolutionary moot-point without new solutions to the water's higher heat-conductivity hedged by the capacity to hunt effectively at the same time.

Speed is the usual solution in the open ocean, while the ability to dive and surface effectively us another.

The first cetaceans were toothed-whales whose torpedo-like body-shape and sheer mass tells the tale for them. As the dolphins and porpoise evolved, however, their adaptational path sacrificed size and blubber to select for speed and a tight-knit social-structure that allows for cooperative hunting.

Later, the baleen-whales evolved to occupy an atypically low trophic-level for a predator, feeding on the tiniest of animals; zooplankton. Teeth were no longer necessary as they fed on krill, tiny crustaceans who in turn feed on the lowest rung of the food-chain; the phytoplankton, who photosynthesize for their energy needs. And speed was also no longer a survival strategy since they no longer had to chase their prey, but rather move from one fertile spot to another much like the grazing herds of herbivores on land.

The sea-otter, however, remained coastal, feeding off the rich resources there on the shallow bottom; mostly clams, mussels, crabs, shrimp, and the echinoderms (the starfish). Speed was not a part of their evolutionary future, but their incredibly thick and warm fur still had to be able to allow them to dive and surface repeatedly to be able to feed enough to sustain their newly evolved high-metabolism.

And the pinnipeds, with their blubber and fur adaptations, kept enough fat to keep warm while allowing them enough speed and agility to catch fish underwater with their teeth. Meanwhile, their fur was likewise adapting to life in the water, becoming more hydrodynamic, providing some heat-preservation without slowing them down by becoming waterlogged.

So there I was. Alone with my thoughts. Another valuable lesson had unfolded right before me. Inclusion or exclusion? Fat or fur? Warmth vs. speed? Survival vs. extinction? Different but the same?

Within the limits of those restrictions lurk many possible solutions. There's always middle-ground between two seemingly incompatible possibilities. Humanity's ongoing cognitive adaptation appears to have made it easier for us to unconsciously exclude those who disagree with us rather than reassess our own views more critically.

Learning that lesson, then, is perhaps the most difficult obstacle for humanity.

Evolution is no more a stampede away from extinction than it is a race toward survival. It's more like an obstacle-course littered with unfamiliar hazards of differing benefit and reward. The laws of nature are inescapable. They determine the same physical reality for us all whether we choose to accept them or not.

Our own evolution as highly social-animals means that inclusion-and-exclusion are merely natural artifacts of the human-reality that we're all in this together. No matter how well we think we understand the most basic laws of nature, the evolutionary connectedness that so fundamentally defines us as human-beings will likely never change.

While natural selection has long been dependent upon large tracts of time spanning many generations, humanity could very well consciously choose the fitness-enhancement of diversity, an evolutionary path toward cooperatively beneficial inclusion over the variance-crushing genetic limitations of exclusion.

Considering the rapidity of environmental change caused by modern society relative to life's past billion years dictated by natural-selection's plodding experiments in survival, choosing inclusion over exclusion appears to be our only viable path for increasing humanity's fitness as a species.

When it's all said and done, what we've really learned is that evolution itself is little more than Mother Nature's long-term experimental-framework. There's no way to know what works other than "giving it a whirl".

Are we up to that? Who knows?

Since survival and extinction are the only possible outcomes perhaps learning that lesson now will be the thing that allows us, rather than mistakenly assuming we can just believe our way into survival as the next destructive comet or deadly gamma-ray burst hurtles toward us…

that choice could make us the first species on Earth to think its way out of extinction.

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Lessons Learned In An Octopus's Garden In The ShadeOctopus in Aquarium ⒸSeattle AquariumBoy and Aquarium ⒸShedHappensTanks by window ⒸAugsburg CollegeCalcareous Algae Tank ⒸReef2reefFoureye butterfly fish ⒸReefRelief Founders dotcom.jpegSargeant Major ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomBanded-butterfly Fish ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomSpotted Drum ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomSpotted Trunkfish ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomyellowtail-snapper ⒸReef2reefScrawled Cowfish ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomSpanish Hogfish ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomScrawled File-fish ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomRed Mangrove Roots ⒸBonita Springs Florida WeeklyQueen Angelfish ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomMangrove Root Barracuda ⒸCora Johnston Smithsonian Environmental Research CenterSponge in AquariumⒸReef BuildersJaws ⒸWikipediaKids Using a Seine Net ⒸBuzzards Bay CoalitionBlue Tang ⒸReef Relief Founders dotcomBlue Marble in Space ⒸZME ScienceThe Pale Blue Dot; earth seen from The Voyager II space-probe ⒸDaily KosPreviousNext"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways."H. Jackson Brown, Jr.was an American author who was best known for his inspirational book, Life's Little Instruction Book, which was a The New York Times Best Seller (1991–1994)."The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to."Dodie Smithwas an English novelist and playwright. She is best known for writing I Capture the Castle (1948) and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956)."I heard one story about an octopus in a home tank who would get out, cruise around the house, take knick-knacks, and drag them back to its tank. Like a dog! They're so smart that there are octopus enrichment handbooks so you don't bore your octopus. I've seen them play with Legos, Mr. Potato Head, you name it!"Sy Montgomeryis a German born, American naturalist, author and scriptwriter who writes for children as well as adults. She is author of 34 books, including The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness"I knew more about produce from the sea than any of my schoolmates, and my reports in school, from kindergarten on, amused and shocked my classmates and teachers. I told them how we ate with chopsticks, had rice and seaweed for breakfast, raw fish, octopus, and sea urchin eggs for supper, and cakes made from sharks."Eugenie Clarkpopularly known as The Shark Lady, was an American ichthyologist known for both her research on shark behavior and her study of fish in the order Tetraodontiformes. Clark was a pioneer in the field of scuba diving for research purposes.“If there is magic on this planet, it’s contained in water.”Lorene Eisleywas an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”Jacques Cousteauwas a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus).“The ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul.”Robert Wylandis an American artist and conservationist best known for his more than 100 Whaling Walls, large outdoor murals featuring images of life-size whales and other sea life to call attention to the plight of whales throughout the world.“I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.”David Levithanis an American young adult fiction author and editor. He has written numerous works featuring strong male gay characters, most notably Boy Meets Boy and Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List.I made decisions that I regret, and I took them as learning experiences... I'm human, not perfect, like anybody else."Queen Latifahknown professionally as Queen Latifah, is an American rapper, actress, and singer. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she signed with Tommy Boy Records in 1989 and released her debut album All Hail the Queen on November 28, 1989, featuring the hit single "Ladies First".Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh."Henry David Thoreauwas an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state."Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret."Benjamin Disraeliwas a British statesman and Conservative politician who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach."Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future."Swami SivanandaCEOwas a yoga guru, a Hindu spiritual teacher, and a proponent of Vedanta. Sivananda was born Kuppuswami in Pattamadai, in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. He studied medicine and served in British Malaya as a physician for several years before taking up monasticismPreviousNextLessons Learned In An Octopus's Garden In The Shade

As a new college graduate equipped with a degree in Ecology, Ethology & Evolution, two Open-Water SCUBA certifications, American Red Cross First Aid, Lifesaving, and Water Safety Instructor Cards, and a lifetime of piloting boats, my first job out of college was as a Biologist and Marine Science Instructor at a Marine Station in the Lower Florida Keys.

After graduating in mid-May, a mere three weeks later I was expected to design, promote, then teach seven three-hour classes in Marine Science. Comprising three 18-day sessions, our Marine Science Summer camp for kids between 12 and 18 years old was the start of many a later career in marine science.

I had studied and well understood the scientific fundamentals of biological topics subsuming ecology. But with a concentration of Biogeography and Population Biology, I wasn't trained in a lot of the details such classes usually cover. I was far more familiar with the fresh-water habitats I had explored as a boy along the banks of the Mississippi and Rock Rivers where I grew up; land-locked northwest Illinois with its many riparian wetlands and back-water islands.

I just didn't have enough local knowledge to teach our more specialized classes like sponge biology, invertebrate zoology, ichthyology, ornithology, shark research, fishery science, and carbonate systems.When my new boss, who was soon to become a mentor and lifetime friend, learned that my family had maintained a freshwater aquarium for years, he told me that I could easily extend what I had learned at college and in my family's home to teaching about marine systems. So he assigned me to our two classes in Marine Aquaria.After 16 years of formal and highly-structured education, I had just been introduced to my first field-lesson in outdoor-learning; watch one, do one, teach one.

While book-learning is critical to effectively interpreting the outdoor-experience, local-knowledge is equally important when leading others with less formal-training and exposure into mother-nature's many and highly varied habitats. The core science might be the same but the details most obvious, and often most popular among those inclined to attend educational field-expeditions in the wilderness, require a quick familiarization with specific and often remote locales to succeed.After doing a lot of reading and polling my fellow instructors who had taught this class in the past, I learned that nearly every student was going to want to stock their tanks with tropical-fish. Which was a problem for several good reasons.

If every student sought to recreate the same contained coral-reef habitat our class would be rather one-dimensional, and they'd miss the opportunity to experience, firsthand, the incredible diversity of the marine habitats in and around our island paradise.

Not to mention that a tank full of fish is difficult to keep clean, a daily chore performed by all the neighboring plants and critters living on the reef with them, none of which could thrive for long in a closed-system like an aquarium. Plus it's difficult to keep coral alive in an aquarium.

The very act of touching a species like Porites, the finger-coral, Diploria, the brain-coral, and Monastrea, the star-coral, to transplant it from the ocean-floor to an aquarium can displace its protective layer of external slime, critical for their survival underwater. But a more practical reason had become clear years before; catching tropical fish is exceedingly difficult.

Our entire entire program was designed around seven classes, 5 of them field expeditions on either a boat or short trip by van where each student would collect specimens for their tank. There were no pet stores on the island to go purchase a new addition to their aquarium like every other home-aquarist in the world.

Which would have spoiled the hands-on learning experience, along with all the fun in taking such a class in the first place. In order to catch any tropical fish to fill an aquarium with colorful tropicals like…

the Butterfly Fish, Angelfish, Damselfish like the the Beaugregory, the Blue Tang, Parrotfish, Yellowtail Snapper, Drums, Tangs, Cowfish, Pipefish…

our students would need to have spent several years acquiring the underwater skills, specialized equipment, and local knowledge at the reef, coral heads, and scattered patch-reefs that surrounded us. Without advanced skin-diving skills, lungs like a sherpa, and the underwater reflexes of a sea-lion they'd be lucky to ever catch anything to house in their tank.They came to our program in order to learn marine science, not sit in front of empty aquaria wishing there was something in there to observe.

So, inspired by the incredible variety of marine life living among the roots of the local red mangroves, during staff-training I experimented with a broken piece of storm-damaged mangrove prop-root I'd found covered with tunicates, sponges, and calcareous algae. Our 75-gallon tanks were long and skinny, a perfect place to recreate and observe the complex habitat of red mangrove roots, natural rookeries for juvenile members of many different species.

By stocking it with marine life we could safely and easily catch through the use of hand-nets, throwing cast-nets, and dragging seines, trawls, and dredges along the bottom, it seemed to me that these concept-tanks would be highly-educational, as well as super-fun for our young students to conceive of, maintain, and stock.

When I managed to net a tiny, recently hatched barracuda about 2-inches long, I knew this concept would work.Each Science Instructor was required to make a brief presentation of their classes the night before our new campers would, much like college registration, sign-up for their four three-hour class slots, that meeting every other day in either the morning and afternoon. So I pitched my class on each of them getting to create what I called #HabitatTanks. Selling them on how much more they'd learn about the marine environment we were in than by concentrating on tropical fish almost none of them had a chance to catch, I was pleased to get a full-class to sign-up.I learned a lot teaching my first class in the field, as did my students. But the creativity these kids could display in conceiving of their own concept-tanks was amazing.

One 13-year-old boy decided on a camouflage tank that looked empty when you first saw it. But, after a while, you'd begin to notice the Peacock Flounder that had hidden itself under the similarly hued sand, the beautifully colored Flamingo Tongue, a snail that lived on a soft-coral head collected in 4-feet of water, and tiny symbiotic Peterson Shrimp hiding in the stinging tentacles of a sea-anemone.A high-school senior from Long Island decided on housing just jellyfish in her tank, featuring a variety of different specimens, like the indigo ocean-hued By-the-Wind-Sailor, Valella valella and the bottom-dwelling Cassiopea, the upside-down jellyfish.

And two young cousins from Wisconsin decided to stock and maintain the constantly refreshed Touchy-Feely Tank located just behind our Wet-Lab on the back patio. It was meant to inspire tactile learning, so they displayed a daily listing of all the critters in the tank, including a clipboard #WishList so their fellow campers could add the names of organisms they wanted to see and touch.

Checking the list every day, they kept me informed about what everyone wanted them to find so we could plan a class-visit to the local habitat where they just might be able to collect it all.

These three tanks were quite popular among the many visitors to our wet-lab between classes during their free-time. It was quite rewarding to see the pride these budding young marine-scientists took in applying and sharing what they'd learned in my very first field-education class.As luck would have it, on our very first day collecting for their #HabitatTanks, we managed to capture a small Octopus while dragging a Seine Net through a turtle-grass bed.

Notoriously difficult to keep in an aquarium, octopus are highly intelligent, and prone to escaping confinement. They cannot breath air but can, for short periods, survive out of the water by breathing from water stored in their mantle. Often found on the laboratory floor after having escaped and tried to crawl to the nearby open ocean, most such escapees died before making their way back to the sea.

So we decided to put it in one of the 250-gallon tanks whose water level we dropped, making for a long dry climb to discourage this marine escape-artist from leaving. By checking its progress every day, keeping it well-fed and supplied with lots of rocks, coral, and sea-grass to hide in, against all odds this octopus stayed with us all summer. It also grew quite a bit under our care, and became an exceedingly popular member of our #MarineHabitatMenagerie.After the summer was over, with all our campers headed back north to their terrestrial homes, we'd drain all the tanks, returning every specimen we'd collected back to the ocean. The rest of our year involved much shorter sessions, usually 3-5 day stays of school classmates with a more structured curriculum where students could collect specimens to study but returning it all to the sea before the boat returned to the harbor.

I kept the Mangrove, Camouflage, and Jellyfish Tanks for their unique educational value, but drained the rest to clean and store for the following summer classes. But decided the octopus needed to get back to the wild. They are such interesting creatures to observe, however, that instead of dropping it over the seawall close to where we'd first captured it, the nearby tidally-fed lagoon seemed like a great release spot.

Dubbed The Shark Pit, it was constantly refreshed by incoming tides. Over the years, all manner of marine life had colonized it. When someone managed to catch a small shark, we'd put them in there too. It made for a great teaching area on our property, a really good resource when the wind was blowing and our fleet was kept in the harbor due to rough waves and low underwater visibility. Referred to as "Foul-Weather Program", you could teach almost any marine-science topic there.

Those juvenile sharks made for a valuable adjunct teaching-message, as well. The mid-70's had recently become "Jaws-crazy" once Peter Benchley's novel was released in 1974, followed by the highly-graphic movie the very next year.We'd occasionally run into students who were reluctant to go in the water out of their fear of sharks. And some, even when they did follow their friends into the water, had a sub-optimal experience. Such fears were not only unwarranted, the fact is that most of our students were thrilled to see this amazing predator in the water with them, familiarizing themselves with its critical role in the ecosystem and reminding them of a fundamental lesson in predator-prey dynamics.Size matters. And since these sharks were small, mostly under 3-foot long nurse lemon and bonnet-heads, that these apex-predators were more afraid of us than we were of them was an important lesson. And obvious to them from the first moment spent in the water with them, quickly realizing that when they got too close for comfort the sharks would swim away from them in a hurry.

That valuable lesson translated quite-well in the open ocean. They all learned that sharks are cautious predators, not the frenzied blood-thirsty feeders they saw in the movies and on television. We'd feed the sharks twice a week to show everyone that while the frenzy-feeding glorified by the media was true, it was rare and always triggered by blood in the water, part of the natural lifestyle of the marine environment for nearly 500 million years.This spectacle conveyed another key lesson in our field-education approach.Paleontology had long-since taught us that life on land originated from the sea, with much evidence that the dramatic proliferation of the new predatory species came during the Cambrian period, some 500 million years ago. Referred to as the "underwater arms race", the soft-bodied organisms of the Ediacaran Period that preceded it gave way to a marine world inhabited by wholly new creatures with hard-bodies, armor-plating, and toothy predators.

In fact, many scientists have begun to question whether this Cambrian Explosion was a real event or just a reflection of the patchiness of this ancient fossil record. Genetic data suggest that multicellular animals evolved over a billion years ago; this is supported by fossil embryos from rocks in China that date back 600 million years. These embryos are more complex than those simple organisms such as sponges and jellyfish, which suggests that multicellular animals must have evolved much further back in time.

So, back at the Lab, I made the necessary preparations to release our octopus. The Shark Pit's small dock seemed like a great place to release our summer-long guest. If it decided to stay there we could count on it as a known inhabitant so new students would know to keep an eye out for it when exploring its rocky shoreline.

I carefully transported it from it's large aquarium, keeping it contained in one of our Touchy-Feely tanks to allow it to acclimate to the ambient water temperature and salinity of its soon to be new home. After a few hours of adjustment to the local ocean-water, I recaptured it by hand to release it right next to the dock's ladder. And that's when things went all jabberwocky.

For reasons I still cannot explain, instead of sliding it into the water and allowing it to slither to its new hiding place, I tossed it into the water near the Shark Pit's deepest spot, maybe 8-feet at high-tide, where we'd constructed an artificial reef out of concrete-blocks and a few metal milk-crates.

It swam at the surface for a moment, then started its descent to the bottom to find a good spot to live. When, all of a sudden, a 3-foot long lemon shark came screaming out of nowhere and gobbled it down it one swift bite.

Octopus are masters at camouflage, spending most of their time hidden in rocks, coral, and sea-grass beds. When they need to move from this protective shelter, they utilize their amazing capacity to change their color and markings to blend in with the bottom as they crawl to a new hiding place. Knowing full well that octopus are highly vulnerable to predation from apex-predators like sharks, dolphins, porpoise, and seals and sea-lions where they thrived, I had nonetheless delivered it directly into harms way. To this day I cannot recall why I suddenly changed my mind from giving it a controlled and safe release in the rocks to carelessly tossing it like a frisbee into a part of the habitat most dangerous for its evolved lifestyle among the rocks.

I was aghast at myself, bewildered by my own thoughtless act. Sad that I'd needlessly sacrificed such a beautiful and interesting specimen. And a bit ashamed at having captured it as a learning tool only to serve it up as a local lemon shark's easiest dinner ever.

It still bugs me nearly 50 years later. But, it ultimately became a valuable, albeit difficult, lesson in the endless chain of them that faces every field-guide.

Harder on the octopus than me, of course, I have come to accept that it taught me to more deeply appreciate my role as a responsible scientist and dedicated conservationist. To take my role as both a teacher and field-guide more seriously. And to treat the organisms I'd collect and observe to learn from and teach others about their natural-history with the respect they deserve.

And there was a one tiny sliver of silver-lining to the dark-cloud I had just created for myself;

I was relieved that my students, who had helped keep it safe all summer, had observed, cared for, and learned from it weren't there to witness my clueless blunder.Anthropogenic-effect has only recently become a common term in science, having been exposed as the chief cause of the Earth's rapid onset of climate-change, a process that became increasingly more obvious every day since then.

It was my first and very hardest lesson in how potent humanity is in manipulating our environment, how powerful our adapted-intelligence is in affecting the fragile balance that underlies the ecological wonder of the Earth's very bounties that made room for humanity in the first place.Our own evolved capacity as human-beings has made us Earth's undisputed apex-predator, imbuing us with the potential for huge effect on the health of every ecosystem on our planet, this blue-marble in space.

Sweet Mother-Earth is the only home we have, and we must learn to treat her with the care she deserves. Humanity simply cannot survive without the healthy ecosystems every life that has ever crawled, swum, or flown on Earth evolved in and around.

In one inattentive moment I had learned, first-hand, that all life is precious no matter where we find it…

no less so than in my very own "Octopus's Garden in the Shade".

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A Frigid Afternoon In The Sunshine StateThe Shark Pit ⒸSeacamp AssociationNo Name Key ⒸFlorida Keys History MuseumShark Pit ⒸSeacamp AssocationShark Pit from inside ⒸSeacamp AssociationFlorida Winter Cold Front ⒸWWSBNurse Shark ⒸThe Florida MuseumLemon Shark ⒸAnimals How Stuff woeks dotcomSouthern Sting ray ⒸWikipediaYellowtail Snapper ⒸFlorida Center For Instructional technologyOctopus ⒸKY3 dotcomSnorkeling Kid ⒸDivers ParadiseSnorkel Clearing ⒸAloha Surf GuideLittle Toot ⒸFair UseDry Lab ⒸSeacamp AssociationPreviousNext" How many women have the courage to start properly with a cold, cold bath early in the morning? I jump in, throw the water, cold as ice, and after the first plunge I am happy."Anna Heldwas a Polish-French stage performer on Broadway. While appearing in London, she was spotted by impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, who brought her to America as his common-law wife. " It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."Teilhard De Chardinwas a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher. He was Darwinian in outlook and the author of several influential theological and philosophical books. He took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the vitalist idea of the Omega Point. With Vladimir Vernadsky he developed the concept of the noosphere."The water is your friend. You don't have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move."Aleksandr Popovwas a Russian organic chemist. He taught chemistry at the University of Kazan and at the University of Warsaw. "It's a beautiful thing, diving into the cool crisp water and then just sort of being able to pull your body through the water and the water opening up for you. "Dawn Fraseris one of is an Australian freestyle champion swimmer and former politician. She is one of only four swimmers to have won the same Olympic individual event three times – in her case the women's 100-metre freestyle.only four swimmers to have won the same Olympic individual event three times – in her case the women's 100-metre freestyle."Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it "Eliza TaborElizabeth McCourt Tabor (September 1854 – March 7, 1935), better known as Baby Doe, was the second wife of Colorado pioneer businessman Horace Tabor. "Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday."Zora Neale Hurstonwas an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo." It was so cold the lawyers had their hands in their own pockets."Unknown"I'm so cold, I'm so cold, I'm so cold, I'm so cold. "OmarionOmari Ishmael Grandberry (born November 12, 1984), better known by his stage name Omarion, is an American singer and songwriter. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the boy band B2K."If you tiptoe into cold water, you're missing out on the rush of plunging in headfirst."Simone Elkelesis an American author known for the teen romance Perfect Chemistry trilogy and How To Ruin trilogy. She is a New York Times Bestselling young adult author."It's important to not be afraid of failure and to push yourself to try things and jump in the cold water. There are incredible, beautiful opportunities out there."Jurgen Teller is a German fine-art and fashion photographer."An undisturbed river is as perfect as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity."Thomas McGuaneis an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors."...go to hear the wind and little else, see the stars and the galaxies, smell the pine trees, feel the cold water, touch the sky and the ground at the same time, listen to coyotes, eat the fresh snow, walk across the desert sands, and realize why its good to go outside of the city and the suburbs."John Muiralso known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-Americanl naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America."I miss the ocean. I miss diving into the cold water and coming out a new man. On the road it's hard to get that feeling. Showers are okay, but there's nothing quite like being in the ocean."Angus Stoneis an Australian soul and pop singer, record producer and audio engineer. He is one half of the musical sibling duo Angus & Julia Stone, with whom he has released four studio albums. "“At the foot of an old, old wharf lived the cutest little tugboat you ever saw. His name was Little Toot. Blow hard as he could, the only sound that came out of his whistle was a small, merry toot-toot-toot”Little TootLittle Toot is a 1939 children's picture book written and illustrated by Hardie Gramatky. It features Little Toot, a small young tugboat in New York Harbor who does not want to tug. Instead, he would rather play, making figure eights in the harbor being a nuisance to all the other tugboats. PreviousNext037. A Frigid Afternoon In The Sunshine State

The first inking I had of the vagaries of spending a winter in the "Sunshine State of Florida" came when I saw the that fireplace in the Staff Lounge of the Lower Keys Marine Station, where I got my first job after graduating from college, had been well-used.

Having camped with the Boy Scouts all over America, born and raised in northwest Illinois where dealing with ice and snow are a daily reality from December through March, I was more than familiar with the comfort that comes from huddling around a blazing-campfire or crackling living-room fireplace.

As incongruous as it might have seemed to me at the time, early June when the days were hot and the nights were warm, I was soon to experience for myself just how cold it can get in Florida. Later that year, when my first December Blue-Norther came screaming through, I was one of the first in line to sit on its hearth warming my chilled bones.

That's what we called winter cold-fronts in the sub-tropics. A place whose climate is dominated by the warm, soothing southeast trade-winds from the Caribbean and bathed in the warm-waters of the Gulf Stream Current driven north from the Earth's equator itself, blue referred to the cold and Norther denoted its origins.

It was a different level of cold than I knew, however. There was no ice to scrape off our windshields or snow to shovel off the sidewalks and driveways. But between the uninsulated walls of all our buildings and what we called our "thinning blood" (having acclimatized to the tropics from our northern homes) we were just not physically or emotionally equipped for low-temperature life anymore.

Our Marine Laboratory complex and Dining Hall were on the southern end of the property, so when the cold winds blew, when we weren't warming ourselves in front of the Staff Lounge fireplace we'd look for work down there in the lee of the those buildings. That was the only place on the property where the sharp northerly wind was blocked and the sunshine from the southern sky could work its magic to warm us up.

Despite our warm-blooded nature, we were emulating cold-blooded snakes warming themselves in the day's first sunlight and looked a bit like the sea-lions of California I'd witnessed hauling themselves out of the cold Pacific Ocean to warm themselves in the sunshine.

I lived and worked there for 8 years, eventually moving north, then west, where the four-season cycle once again ruled my year instead of the 2-season wet-dry climate of the topics. Every winter I spent there found myself marveling anew at just how cold it could get in a place revered as "The Sunshine State"!

Some years later I visited the place with my brother and his family, and was harshly reminded of Blue-Northers in the Sub-tropics. Old memories came flooding back to me in the exact same parts of the property.

It was the Spring of 1998, accompanying my brother and his young kids to a vacation at Disney World. Along with three days spent at The Magic Kingdom, we also planned a 4-day trip to my old stomping grounds on Big Pine Key to visit my former island home for a few days sailing and snorkeling in and around the rich ecosystems of the Lower Florida Keys.

The kids had their own snorkeling gear, so I spent some time at our Disney World condo teaching the kids how to skin-dive in both shallow and deep water; how to put on dive-gear correctly, make surface dives in deep water, kick one's way through shallow water without disturbing the bottom, clear your mask when it leaked, and expel the water that always accumulates in the bottom of a snorkel.

My niece, only 6-years old at the time, was having trouble clearing her snorkel at the surface, a nearly constant process while snorkeling in shallow-water. Since we were going to be exploring sponge flats, diving among the mangroves that built each island, and visiting some of the many local coral reefs, all in less that 6-feet of water, she needed to master this skill to fully appreciate the experience.

So I told her to pretend she was a tugboat chugging around the harbor as we kicked our way around the swimming-pool. When she needed to clear her snorkel all she had to do was sound her horn by saying "toot-toot-toot" into the snorkel's mouthpiece.

That action naturally expels the water from the snorkel, and made her look like a surfacing whale and sound like working tugboat. She caught on fast, and soon was making everyone anywhere near the pool-deck smile as she "toot-toot-tooted" her way through the water.

Now we were ready to go skin-diving. When we finally made it the Lower Keys a tour of the facility was the first order of business.

It's an impressive place despite the simple buildings and open-air Tiki-Huts arrayed around a huge harbor. Filled with 26-foot, twin-engine flat-top teaching catamarans, sailboats, and houseboats. it was situated at the southeast end of Big Pine Key, the tour always ends at the south-end where the Lab Complex was.

Outfitted with both a wet-lab filled with aquaria of many different shapes and sizes and a dry-lab for more traditional classroom sessions, the back-deck featured a series of what we called touchy-feely tanks. A prime teaching area, when filed with different specimens from around the area students could observe and even pick up some of them to inspect more closely, it was always a popular venue.

Fed by off-shore pipes, we regularly collected-and-released its inhabitants to use to teach our marine-science programs. And, situated right next to the complex, was a tidally-fed pool we called The Shark Pit. Too big and aggressive to keep in our touchy-feely tanks, any small sharks, rays, or other large critters we caught while fishing or collecting off the sea-wall were released there.

There are few things more exciting than seeing real sharks up close in the same water you are swimming in with them. The kids had heard me talk about it for years and were totally stoked to get in and put their new snorkeling skills to use. Not to mention swim with the sharks!

There was only one problem; a cold-front had blown through a few days before. The crisp cold air had lingered, dropping the local water-temperature from the mid-80's to the high-60's. Such cold-snaps, referred to as fish-kills, can kill some species of fish, crustacean, and mollusk, all cold-blooded and mortally-sensitive to the ambient water-temperature.

As warm-blooded creatures, referred to as homeostasis to biologists, we are not nearly as susceptible to such changes in water temperature. But that doesn't mean it's comfortable for us.

While some hardier humans can walk around shirtless in 60-degree weather, the fact is that water conducts heat 28x faster than the air. So what feels as merely chilly to us while walking around on terra-firma literally drains us of energy when submersed in water that cold, our homeostatic thermostat working hard to keep out internal temperature at a consent 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

LD-50, LD meaning "lethal dose', is a term biologists use to characterize the level of any external stimulus that kills 50% of a population, be it poison, radiation, or in this case temperature. It factors into a general rule-of-thumb about water-temperature's effect on human-beings, known as #TheRuleOf50's…

50-degree water kills 50% of those immersed in it for more than 50 minutes.

While snorkeling in 68-degree water might not be fatal to us, it certainly was not at all like a bath-tub filled with 90-degree water or the 75-degree heated-swimming pool at our condo. When you consider that we land-lubbers tend to climb in-and-out, the crisp wind on our wet skin makes things even colder for us.

My nephew was the first one in, a budding 8-year-old Marine-Scientist in his own right, he carefully slipped into the water from the dock as I'd taught him to prevent stirring up the sandy bottom, ruining the water's visibility.

Even with a mask on we could see his eyes get as big as dinner-plates. And with a big-kick shot out of the cold-water.

He was reluctant to get back in, standing there shivering as I exhorted him to get back in because he'd be a lot warmer in the water than standing there soaking wet in the chilly northern-wind. As luck would have it, two 3-foot long lemon sharks swam slowly by and he slid back in to follow them. His 6-yo sister went in right after him, equally afflicted by the cold, but unable to resist swimming with the sharks.

My friends had gathered around us as we watched them swim in slow circles, following the lemon, nurse, and bonnet-head sharks constantly circling the lagoon like their ancestors, fated to keep swimming all their lives in order to keep water running over their gills in to breathe.

Experienced marine science instructors themselves, they were amused by her consent "toot-toot-tooting". More out of a reaction to the cold than a filling snorkel, I explained my method for teaching youngsters how clear their snorkels.

Later on, bundled up in towels and huddled around that very same fireplace in the Staff Lounge, we talked about what they'd seen. Our winter-time Staff Lounge was never empty when a Blue-Norther was in charge, and as the only kids on the property at the time they were the center of attention, enjoying a 20-to-2 teacher-student ratio until it was time to head back to our hotel.

The next day our adventure was sailing the back-country on a 41' junk-rigged trimaran, The Water Spyder, owned and captained by an old friend and former roommate. We sailed all day in mostly shallow water, her 24" draught allowing us to traverse in and out of its many mangrove islands, sponge-flats, patch-reefs, and grass-beds.

But not one of us even thought about breaking our dive-gear despite seeing a host of small sharks, rays, schools of tarpon, dolphin pods, and cormorants diving for fish right in front of us.

After shivering our way through The Shark Pit, we'd all had enough of the cold-water and enjoyed exploring that ecosystem from the sun-warmed deck of the boat, the chilly wind of yesterdays' Blue Norther giving way to a more southerly breeze as the Sunshine State returned to its more typical weather.

We spent another fantastic day in the Fabulous Florida Keys, laughing as we all "toot-toot-tooted" our way into the harbor at the end of the day. Except for my niece. She'd fallen asleep in the salon of the sail-boat's main cabin, lasting as long as her 6-year-old countenance could muster. Two days of cold-water, chilly wind, sunshine, and exercise had taken its toll.

And so it is with all Field-Trips into the wilderness. Maybe every trip we take…the excitement of the first moments of our adventure eventually giving way to the quiet reflection that comes at the end of every such expedition.

In the words of the great American Naturalist, John Muir;

"Wilderness is not only a haven for native plants and animals, but it is also a refuge from society.

It's a place to go to hear the wind and little else, see the stars and the galaxies, smell the pine trees, feel the cold water, touch the sky and the ground at the same time, listen to coyotes, eat the fresh snow, walk across the desert sands, and realize why its good to go outside of the city and the suburbs." ~John Muir

And we'd just followed his advice to a T. Diving in water just a bit colder than we expected. Breathing fresh-air a trifle crisper than we are accustomed to. Basking in sunshine free of urban haze. And curling up on a toasty warm bed in the cozy salon of the boat that took us out there. Every Field-Trip I have ever led has gone that way.

Oh how I hope that never changes!

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Captain Underpants At The Helm Of The Cold Duck

Father and sons in a Rowing Dinghy ⒸOffset lake of the ozarks map ⒸOzark Realty LotO ⒸAerial Panorama of Lake of the Ozarks MO CC BY-SA 2.0 Wooded Cove Ⓒadirondackmtlanddotcom double-0decker dock ⒸWilliamsLakefrontdotcom red-headed-woodpecker ⒸBirdFeederHub 36 Feet 1954 Chris-Craft Commander ⒸAntique Boat America Cold Duck ⒸAndre wooded cover ⒸVRBOdotcom double-decker dock ⒸlakeHomesdotcom diving boy Ⓒ617Magdotcom The Helm ⒸPD Boy At Helm ⒸDissolve Boy with binoculars on a boat joyful boy ⒸPD Previous Next “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.”

Leonardo da Vinciwas an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. “The good seaman weathers the storm he cannot avoid, and avoids the storm he cannot weather.”

Unknown “A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.”

Thomas Carlylewas a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

Senecausually known as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and, in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature. “The art of the sailor is to leave nothing to chance.”

Annie Van De Wielewas a famous Belgian sailor, circumnavigator, and author. “At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how much.”

Robin Lee Grahamis an American sailor who set out to sail around the world alone as a teenager in the summer of 1965. National Geographic magazine carried the story in installments (October 1968, April 1969, October 1970), and he co-wrote a book, titled Dove, detailing his journey. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore! Dream! Discover!”

Mark Twainaka, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. “A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

Grace Hopperwas an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. “In calm water, every ship has a good captain.”

Grover Clevelandwas an American lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897, the only president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms in office. “When I lost my rifle, the Army charged me 85 dollars. That is why in the Navy the Captain goes down with the ship.”

Dick Gregorywas an American comedian, civil rights leader and vegetarian activist. Previous Next

Captain Underpants At The Helm Of The Cold Duck

Growing up on the shores of the Mississippi River in Rock Island County Illinois, the second son of man who served in the US Navy in WWI who grew up there as well, I learned how to pilot boats early in life.

My first training was in a 12' dinghy rented for the afternoon in the Wisconsin Dells. Dad taught his three sons how to man the oars and navigate facing away from the destination at the same time. After joining the Boy Scouts, I quickly graduated to canoes, kayaks, and even small sailboats. As I got older, powerboats were included in my Kid-Captain's flotilla; mostly skiffs, runabouts, and the occasional house-boat.Then in the late 1960's we began to vacation in the Lake of the Ozarks, staying with my Aunt and Uncle at their company-owned corporate retreat on Peckerwood Cove, not far from Camdenton Missouri.They also kept a company-boat, a 42' Chris-Craft Cabin Cruiser powered by twin gasoline engines, at the local marina; Mistwood Kai. My brothers and I were breathless with excitement to see all the cabin-cruisers, speedboats, houseboats, and even sailing-yachts kept there. Finally, toward the end of dock furthest from the car, there she was.

Her name was the Cold Duck, and I loved her at first sight. I still do. I'll never forget my first glimpse of of her clean lines and ship-shape profile in the water.

Uncle Kinney, his real name by the way and definitely kin to me since he was married to my dad's sister, soon noticed my keen interest in boats. So he engaged me as his deckhand.

That meant daily chores like checking the gas, batteries, oil, blower, keeping the cabin cleaned and free of all the kids' toys, testing the horn, checking the life-preservers and life-buoys, anchor-tackle, fire-extinguishers, and official paperwork so she was ready to sail at a moment's notice.

Testing the horn was a real treat, outfitted with what he referred to as "Italian Taxi Cab Horns" that sounded more like a Coast Guard Cutter on patrol than a cabin-cruiser on a lake. My reward for all that work was getting to be Uncle Kin's Second-Mate when we were underway. She was my first command, serving under him, of course, as the Master and Captain of the Cold Duck.So one Saturday we went on an all-day excursion to Bagnell Dam, the structure that had created the Lake of the Ozarks in the first place. It was a bit of a tourist trap, but with 7 kids under the age of 17, 5 under the age of 10, it was the perfect destination for a 2-family day-trip. My older brother drove there with his brand-new driver's license, and some of the kids went with him.

I stayed aboard as the deck-hand., my Dad and Uncle steering her the entire way there. I knew I'd get a chance at the helm, eventually, and now realize that they had planned on prolonging my suspense by not mentioning it all day.We spent the day visiting a variety of kid-oriented activities like the petting zoo, amusement park, pinball-arcade, and street-vendors hawking everything from ice-cream and taffy-apples to hot pretzels and corn-dogs. We had dinner at a dockside restaurant, then split into groups to head back home. My older brother took charge of all the kids, driving all the kids to get them there before bedtime for my two youngest cousins. It was a just a 15-minute trip by car, but took over an hour by boat in the many winding channels of the huge lake.Excited for my anticipated turn at the helm, I ran down the dock to get the Cold Duck ready for our voyage home just as a large cruiser went by a bit too fast for the no-wake zone. The floating-dock started to bounce in the waves and I got tossed into the water.

So, there I was, soaking wet without a change of clothes for the 90-minute cruise back home. My Mom and Aunt took me below, stripped me out of my wet clothing, dried me off, and put a towel around my waist, allowing to keep wearing my damp underpants, recognizing the dignity due a 13-yo boy.When we came up on deck my Uncle handed me a local navigational-chart, some binoculars, and the keys to Cold Duck saying "get us home". Then the 4 of them, Mom and Dad and Aunt and Uncle, broke out the deck chains and sat down to a nice peaceful extended cocktail hour without all the kids underfoot.My Dad assured me that he had run the pre-voyage checklist while i was below. So I went about setting up the chart-table, ran the blowers, fired her up, and finally ordered my deckhands, Dad and Uncle Kin, to man the lines, cast off, and stow the dock-bumpers.I maneuvered us away from the dock using the twin-engines to steer as I'd been taught, and slowly navigated us though the no-wake zone until we hit the main-channel. All was clear ahead, so I pushed the throttles forward and soon we were planing at about 20-knots headed toward home.I was in nautical-heaven, a place I'd dreamed of for years. I remember every minute of the voyage, now seeming like it took all night but lasted only 5 minutes or so.Despite never having been there before, I had paid attention on the way out and followed the markers on the chart. At one point, however, I was in doubt about a turn we were facing. Port or starboard? I just couldn't remember.

So I brought us to an idle, grabbed the binoculars, and made my way forward to the fore-deck to scan the horizon looking for landmarks. Suddenly, there it was, the only bridge on the lake, which we needed to pass under to get home, peeking out from around a spit of land on the port side.

I heard my Uncle remark "Now that's a smart kid!". My heart swelled with pride, and my head too, I'm afraid. I bragged about it to my brothers for the rest to of the trip, something I'm know they tired of after a while. Because both of them told me to shut up already by the time we headed back home to Illinois.After I'd docked the boat, secured the lines, and helped my mom and aunt off and on to the dock, my Uncle tapped me on the shoulder and said "Nice job, Captain Underpants".I looked down, grinning and turning red with embarrassment at the same time, realizing I was standing there clad only in my white fruit-of-the-looms and tennis shoes. I'd been so absorbed in my duties that I hadn't noticed the beach-towel wrapped around my waist slipping off when I made my way up to the fore-deck.

He smiled at me, ruffled my hair, and we never discussed it again.

And so ended the maiden-command of Captain Underpants and the Cold Duck. That day was a turning point in my life, shaping my future. I went on to college with a major in Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution, eventually working as a Marine-Biologist and serving as a Field-Guide teaching about Mother-Nature and the Great-Outdoors in many beautiful and remote locales.

I understood, perhaps for the first time, what a truly lucky kid I was.

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Expected Value

Previous Next “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”"

"Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplacewas a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. “The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.”

Nassim Nicholas Talebis a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist[1] whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. "Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations.""

Ryunosuke Satorois regarded as the "Father of the Japanese short story" and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. "When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have"

Stephen Hawkingwas an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who, at the time of his death, was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. "A simple lifestyle can make you happy and high expectations can disappoint a lot."

Koena Mitra is an Indian actress and model who appears in Bollywood films. "I am happy with what comes, I don't have expectations of any stature."

Leon Russell"I am happy with what comes, I don't have expectations of any stature." was an American musician and songwriter who was involved with numerous bestselling records during his 60-year career that spanned multiple genres including rock-and-roll, country, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, southern rock, blues rock, folk, surf and the Tulsa Sound. Sergey Brin "I had no dreams of such economic success. You should have fun and not be so weighed down by expectations."

Sergey Brinis an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur. He co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. "Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations." also known as "Dr. Love",

Leo Buscagliawas an American author, motivational speaker, and a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. "We don't want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else."

Lauryn Hillis an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and actress. She is often regarded as one of the greatest rappers of all time, as well as being one of the most influential musicians of her generation. "As far as expectations go, you can never work for expectations. You have to work against them."

Kajol Devgan, aka Kajolis an Indian actress. Described in the media as one of the most successful actresses of Hindi cinema,[2] she is the recipient of numerous accolades, including six Filmfare Awards, among which she shares the record for most Best Actress wins with her late aunt Nutan. "There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love."

Erich Fromm was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist.st, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. A German Jew, he fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US. "Expectation is the root of all heartbreak".

William Shakespearewas an English playwright, considered by many to be the finest writer in modern history. "Statistics is the grammar of science."

Karl Pearsonwas an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than for illumination."

Andrew Langwas a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. Previous Next Expected Value

Mention some recent scientific finding and watch everyone's ears perk up. I know, because I taught about Marine Mammals every Saturday afternoon for 10 years at K-dock on Pier39 where San Francisco's famous California Sea Lions haul out.

I'd stake out a spot on the viewing stands right in front of the docks where they were busy sleeping, barking, play-fighting, and generally being Sea-Lions. With several pairs of binoculars, a spotting scope, a few picture-books of The Marine Mammal Center's operations in Sausalito along with a few pelts and bones to touch, many visitors would stop to take a look, inevitably leading to more questions about them.

It's among the busiest and most popular of San Francisco's many tourist venues. On any given Saturday I could count on over 500 contacts with a curious public. While I'd stress science and the natural history of the pinnipeds, seals sea-lions and walrus, I'd occasionally have to quote a few statistics.

Which, even in the fresh air and sunshine of San Francisco Bay, threatened to put them to sleep. Because If there's a topic or college class that, statistically speaking, puts more students to sleep than any other it's got to be Statistics. Mention anything that even has the word statistics in it, other than sports, and most people's eyes start slamming shut.

But everything I know, am able to pass on to these curious visitors, came to be known after some scientist cared enough to devise an experimental design with some cogent statistical test pointing the way to the truth. Or "the best information we have for now" as scientists put it.

And at the heart of every statistical test or prediction is a thing called "The Expected Value";

"In probability theory, the expected value (also called expectation, expectancy, mathematical expectation, mean, average, or first moment) is a generalization of the weighted average. Informally, the expected value is the arithmetic mean of a large number of independently selected outcomes of a random variable."

I almost put myself to sleep reading that definition. So I get it. Statistics get tediously boring quite fast.

Yet the truth is inescapable; questions I get while teaching in the field, the ones I can answer with confidence at any rate, are asked and subsequently answered with an "expected value" validating them both. Because no good result can come from an invalid question, and no answer can be generated with confidence without a good question having paved the way.

- Were whales originally land animals?
- Are sea-lions and lions related?
- Could the American Bald Eagle's near extinction by 1963 have been caused by DDT?
- Are the ocean's getting more acidic?
- And, if so, how can excess carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere be the cause of that?

All good questions, it's "expected values" to the rescue every time.

Yet a stark irony comes with that reality, learned once and for all when I was getting my Masters degree in Statistics. The most important lesson we learned while seeking out those 'expected values" was to avoid "expectations". As a statistical consultant, the worst thing we could do was "expect" any knowledge, prowess, or assumption about the problem, the data, or our clients

So the "expected value" at the heart of anything we discover about the natural world is seemingly contradicted by any "expectations" that such insight can solve our problems.

Confused? Welcome to the club. So were we. But not anymore. Because I've learned how and why they are very different things.

Expected values come from data, while expectations come with us before we ever lay our eyes on a speck of experimentally derived evidence. The former comes from hard-won knowledge, the latter is a mere artifact of our human cognitive machinery.

We were required to take 10 hours of 'statistical consulting", then work another 10 hours as a "statistical consultant" in Florida State University's Statistical Consulting Center to graduate. As a State capital and the home of Florida A&M University as well as FSU, Tallahassee is a great place to host such a center. That we were hopping busy neatly underscores its excellent placement.

It was there, after a series of time-consuming sessions with a ranking member of the State of Florida Attorney General's office, that a path to learning that lesson first-hand came my way.

"Estoppel" is an equitable doctrine in the law, a bar that prevents one from asserting a claim or right that contradicts what one has said or done before, or what has already been legally established as true. It can be used as a bar to the re-litigation of issues or as an affirmative defense.

His group had devised a pre-indictment ratings-system for use by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The scale they used ran from minus-5 to positive-5, labeled as "weak precedent" to "strong precedent" based on past case-law. Referred to as a Likert Scale, it's fairly standard practice in such applications.

So I couldn't figure out why this client kept coming back. They wanted a final estimate of the likelihood the case for indictment could be supported by "collateral estoppel", a specialized issue-barring concept. I'd set up a spread-sheet for him that would programmatically take care of the statistical computations.

After some thoughtful questioning about their methodology, I learned that as principal investigator he was expected to present and defend the results of the survey to the Attorney General himself. He felt he couldn't, which presented an insurmountable problem when the result is, as in this case, the "expected value" or "average score".

I recall the moment the light bulb went-off inside my head. While writing out the simple computational algorithm on the nearby blackboard, again, I caught his eye for a moment and saw his deep concentration on this simple bit of arithmetic. Glancing at his notes, the real problem became apparent. He didn't know how to add positive and negative numbers.

Raised to be tactful, I couldn't point out that it was basic math he should have learned way back in the 6th grade. So, adding one more step demonstrated how the average scores were calculated in the spreadsheet I built them. I explained it verbally, in his terms, as…

"minusing a minus turns it into a plus."

And I never saw him again. Apparently, he was able to carry the statistical-ball himself from then on. It was inconceivable to me that someone who had attained a Bachelors Degree, then a Law Degree from two well-regarded colleges could not know such a simple thing. That after over 20 years of formal education this could have slipped though his training unnoticed.

Yet it had. Reputed to be a brilliant litigator, and a truly interesting conversationalist as it turns out, he was well-schooled in literature, writing, history, communications, and the law. But not basic arithmetic.

How it is that the multitude of complex thoughts that went through my mind at the same time from nearly 40 years ago can seem like yesterday still amazes me.

I recall feeling incredulity. A bit of sad judgement along with its twin, prideful superiority. Humor. Empathy. And more than a bit of chagrin, all at the same time.

- incredulity, at his lack of basic arithmetical skills.
- judgment, about how that could possibly have come about after all his schooling.
- humor, since I knew more than a few math-geeks in my in office whose last book read was written by Dr. Seuss.
- momentary pride, for not having any of that in my intellectual development.
- and chagrin, since I had to ask him to define "estoppel ", a word I'd never even heard of in my own 18-year education process until our first meeting.

Looking back, I recognize now that he was far more in touch with the basic theme of "Great Expectations" than me, Charles Dickens most sophisticated novel about "desire and self-improvement". Its subliminal moral message, that love loyalty and conscience are more significant than wealth social status and class was directly on point here.

I'd been afforded an opportunity to learn several great lessons in life at once;

- words have distinct meanings for good reason, something I knew already, but was coming to understand and appreciate more fully with his help.
- expected outcomes and a priori expectations are very different things.
- no one, no matter what level of training they have, can know everything.
- and, perhaps most important, that not knowing something is a welcome opportunity to learn, not an incriminating exposure of weakness.

One of my Professors had schooled us on this; anecdotally. You see, he was living outside of town in an RFD, a rural fire district. Just not Mayberry RFD, as featured in the 1970's TV show of the same name starring Andy Griffith.

Since north Florida is ecologically dominated by the Pine-Palmetto fire-climax community its many National and State Forests operated under the auspices of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. Providing national leadership to enable interoperable locally operated and managed wilderness fire operations, they oversaw those RFD's by coordinating federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial partners.

As a volunteer Dispatcher for his district north of town, he discovered his own expectations made him a less than stellar performer in getting their all-volunteer fire-fighting crews mobilized. Trained to ask routine questions like "What's your phone number?" and "What's your mailing address?", he quickly learned that the to seemingly easy questions formed during training-sessions in a conference room might not be so easy to answer for someone calling from inside a kitchen that was on fire!

So he assembled some probing followup-questions for the Dispatchers when they couldn't get a good location from the harried callers. Questions like "Who's your closest neighbor?" and "How long does it take to drive to your home from Tallahassee?" helped them pinpoint the location when used in conjunction with some maps be assembled to augment the Dispatcher's fire-location resources.

He taught us that to be useful to our clients we had to learn how to recognize our own expectations about them before we even met them.

By previewing their research, data they might have sent us, or even the literature in journals chronicling their specialty, we could turn three sessions into one. Help them understand the statistics used in a way they could defend to others on their own. And even prevent embarrassing yet natural gaps in their knowledge about applied mathematics from becoming common knowledge among their cohorts.

He was a wise man, utterly dedicated to his craft, and a great teacher. I've since applied my statistical mentor's #NoExpectations approach when leading groups into "The Great Outdoors" as a Field-Guide.

Having learned to inform the group what they can expect to see without fueling their expectations, it seems as if everyone has benefited.

Knowing what to expect can be truly useful information. But planting an expectation about an upcoming foray into the wilderness does nothing but set people up for disappointment. And that's where the value of the "expected value" lies. Instructing others to "expect without expectation" might, at first blush, seem like conflicting advice.

But the two concepts are like oil and water, an intellectual emulsion, so to speak. Adjacently arrayed top-to-bottom while never meeting.

To inform others while being open to learning something new oneself can be expected to be valuable without any expectations of extracting that value simply by recognizing it. So, values can be valuable, if they're the right ones, while many ostensible valuables turn out to have no value at all.

Such blatant contradiction can seem confusing, much like expectations. But even confusion has value if we can just learn how to expect that there can be something valuable hidden deep inside it.

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She Done What She Could

Deere Wiman House ~1990; ⒸButterworth Center & Deere-Wiman House Overlook, Moline, Illinois ~1900; ⒸButterworth Center & Deere-Wiman House A Man In Full Ⓒ ELDREDGE ATL and Tom Wolfe Confederate graves at Natchez MS City Cemetery ⒸCC BY-SA 3.0 Sarah A. Miller's headstone; ⒸFind-A-Grave dotcom Stanton Hall Natchez MS ⒸCC BY 3.0 Rosalie Mansion,, Natchez MS ⒸCC BY 3.0 test tube baby ⒸThe Embryo Project encyclopedia Arizona State University Pulsar ⒸDiscover Magazine Rosalind Franklin's Xray chrystallograph of the DNA molecule ⒸNature Magazine Nuclear Fission Ⓒwhatisnuclearpower nside The Leper Colony Kalaupapa on Molokai Visit; ⒸRanker Annie Jump Cannon's star classification system ⒸBritannicadotcom Margaret Knight's paper bag machine Ⓒameirca comes alive The Landlord's Game (Monopoly); ⒸTheBestSchoolsdotocm Babbage's Analytical-engine with Ada Lovelace programming ⒸAdaDiamonds Margaret Keane Big Eye ⒸVulture drawing for Trotula Plata ©Donald Woodman Opiate Receptors ⒸWhyFiles Cecilia Payne's H-He ratio discovery ⒸAmerica Museum Of natural History Confederate Monument in Memorial Park, Nachez MS; ⒸListenUpYall dotcom Previous Next "We soon discovered that patients needed to be restrained from volunteering too much."

Jean Marian Purdywas an embryologist and nurset who was a key figure in the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978, yet was excluded from a plaque at the Oldham hospitals involved. "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them."

Jocelyn Bell Burnellwas a British astrophysicist who discovered pulsars. "Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."

Rosalind Elsie Franklinwas specifically hired for her skills as a chemist to work with James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, the three credited with discovering the structure of DNA. The only trained chemist in the lab, Franklin’s amazingly revealing X-ray crystallograph of the DNA molecule was the key evidence in the published papers of their discovery. “Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.”

Lise Meitneran Austrian-Swedish physicist, along with Otto Hahn and Otto Robert Frisch, was part of a trio who discovered the nuclear fission of uranium in 1939. "I work and i work and still it seems that i have done nothing."

Alice Augusta Ballworked on a treatment for leprosy while at the University of Hawaii in the early 20th century (a big problem at the time in Hawaii). Tragically, Ball died on December 31, 1916, at the young age of 24. Probably after complications from inhaling chlorine gas in a laboratory accident. "Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all."

Annie Jump Cannonwas an astronomer best known for coming up with the current system of stellar classification. Her system — ranking stars as O, B, A, F, G, K or M, with "O" being the hottest stars and "M" the coolest (the sun is a "G" star) — is still used today. "I'm not surprised at what I've done. I'm only sorry I couldn't have had as good a chance as a boy, and have been put to my trade regularly."

Margaret Knightwas an American inventor, notably of a machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags. She has been called "the most famous 19th-century woman inventor". “Little landlords take a general delight in demanding the payment of their rent.”

Elizabeth Magiewas an American game designer, writer, feminist, and Georgist. She invented The Landlord's Game, the precursor to Monopoly, to illustrate teachings of the progressive era economist Henry George. "Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans - everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers."

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron)was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. "The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too."

Margaret Keanewas an American artist known for her paintings of subjects with big eyes. She mainly painted women, children, or animals in oil or mixed media “Women, because of their modesty, dare not reveal the difficulties of their illnesses to a male doctor. Therefore, feeling sorry for their misfortunes, I began to carefully study the diseases that most frequently afflict the female sex."

Trota of Salernowas the world's first gynecologist. She was a medical practitioner and writer in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno who lived in the early or middle decades of the 12th century. "To me, the rainbow was a profoundly hopeful symbol, separating the the white light of appearances into its multiple spectrum and revealing a hidden dimension. It reminded me of my belief that it was the mission of science to pierce through the layers of everyday reality and penetrate to the truth.”

Candace Pertwas an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist who discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain “I was to blame for not having pressed my point. I had given in to Authority when I believed I was right. That is another example of How Not To Do Research. I note it here as a warning to the young. If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position.”

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkinwas a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium Previous Next

Michelle is an accomplished Naturalist and career High School Teacher in the Magnet Science-Marine Science-Molecular Biology programs at Everett High School in Everett, WA.

She is an avid hiker, kayaker, and all around Naturalist, having taught Marine Science coast-to-coast. from her native New York, to Maine, to the Floria Keys, to the Pacific Northwest.

She Done What She Could

My Mother was the Director of an Historical House, the mansion home of a Midwestern Captain of Industry, "A Man In Full" as Tom Wolfe described in his 1998 book of the same name. The expansive estate's informal name, Overlook, was well-earned given its commanding presence on the edge of the river-bluff with a sweeping view of the Mississippi River. And, not inconsequentially, the family's factories.

Built in 1872 as the home of the founding scion's son and family, it was eventually left in Trust in the early 1980's to serve as a community center for the Mississippi River-front town where I grew up, it was quite a popular venue for Boy Scout courts-of-honor, piano recitals, art-showings, new book readings, lectures, and a variety of other community functions.Always a history-buff, Mom availed herself of the opportunity to visit other such places in the world to augment Overlook's programs, seeking to edify the community with programs in the arts & sciences and generally invigorate community pride based on the area's rich history.

One way she accomplished this was to visit the local cemeteries, some even attached to similar family homes. With a BA degree in History specializing in the Civil War, she was especially interested in the Antebellum-Reconstruction era South, another area with well–documented family homes that were historically-rich in both place and time.

In Natchez Mississippi, the local newspapers and war veterans played a leading role in the maintenance of "The Lost Cause". Elite women were particularly important in establishing cemeteries and veterans' memorials, such as the now controversial Confederate Monument dedicated on Memorial Day 1890. This enabled white noncombatants left to rebuild "The South" to lay claim to the watershed event in the reshaping of Southern history, proof positive of the role local history plays in shaping the culture of both people and places in time.

On one such foray she came across a headstone, the final resting place of one "Sarah A. Miller", whose epitaph read; "She Done What She Could"

Tickled by both the poor grammar and poignant portrayal of how women were forced to effect change in a patriarchal society, Mom often quoted this sentiment about ambitious women she admired. History is full of the accomplishments of incredibly talented women who suffered the odious practice of the men in their lives taking credit for their accomplishments. Or, in this case, having to endure the wars their Men started and inflicted on their family lives.

Here are just a few of the most egregious examples the institutional chauvinism sometimes outright patrician-larceny, of an exceptional woman's accomplishments; Jean Marian Purdy was a key figure in the birth of the first IVF baby, in-vitro fertilization, in 1978. An embryologist and nurse, she was excluded from a plaque at the Oldham hospitals where the research and procedure took place. Professor Sir Robert Edwards was later awarded the Nobel prize. Purdy was excluded due to the Nobel Society's policy against the Prize being awarded posthumously. Edwards protested her exclusion in a letter of 1981, writing: “I feel this especially about Jean Purdy, who travelled to Oldham with me for 10 years, and contributed as much as I did to the project. Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself.”

Yet the commemorative plaque at Kershaw’s Cottage hospital near Oldham was posted without Purdy’s name.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a British astrophysicist, was a PhD student when she discovered repeating pulses of radio waves after studying months of radio telescope data. These became known as pulsars – spinning neutron stars which weigh more than the sun. Burnell’s supervisor, Antony Hewish, was credited with the discovery and awarded a Nobel in 1974. She was not included,

Hardly angry, to her credit, she was, rather, thrilled for the Prize finally coming Astronomy. She hadn't expected to be acknowledged — graduate students rarely were. But this was the first time the physics Nobel had ever been granted to someone studying the stars.

Rosalind Franklin was specifically hired for her skills as a chemist to work with James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, the three men credited with discovering the structure of DNA. However, as the only trained chemist in the lab, it was Franklin’s amazingly revealing crystallograph of the DNA molecule that was the key evidence in the published papers of their discovery.

It is generally accepted that when Crick and Watson were awarded a Nobel in 1962, had Franklin been alive, she ought to have been included. However, in yet another revealing sexist wrinkle, that stipulation against posthumous awards was not instated until 1974.

In yet another political irony, despite his larceny of her intellectual-property, Wilkins (whom the Nobel Committee clearly saw as second fiddle to Watson & Crick) took the lead in exploring the social responsibilities of scientists, elected the first President of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish physicist was part of a trio, including Otto Hahn and Otto Robert Frisch, who discovered the nuclear fission of uranium in 1939. This led to the development of nuclear weapons in the second world war, and later the generation of electricity from nuclear reactors. Meitner was nominated for a Nobel many times but it was Hahn who received the award in 1944. When it came time to publish, Hahn knew that including a Jewish woman on the paper would cost him his career in Germany. So he published without her, falsely claiming that the discovery was based solely on insights gleaned from his own chemical purification work, and that any physical insight contributed by Meitner played an insignificant role.

Publicly humiliated when he had trouble explaining his own findings, having put forth no plausible mechanism as to how uranium atoms had split into barium atoms, a few weeks later Meitner wrote her famous "fission letter" to the editor, explaining the mechanism of “Hahn’s discovery.” Yet, despite that, the Nobel Committee awarded him the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei”.

Paradoxically, even comically, the word “fission” never appeared in Hahn’s original publication, Meitner having coined the term in her letter.

Alice Ball, while at the University of Hawaii in the early 20th century, worked on a treatment for leprosy, a big problem at the time in Hawaii. Tragically, Ball died on December 31, 1916, at the young age of 24. Probably after complications from inhaling chlorine gas in a laboratory accident.

The President of the College of Hawaii, Dr. Arthur Dean, continued Ball’s study without giving her credit for it, claiming authorship of the discovery, calling it the “Dean method”. Ball was the first woman and first African American to receive a master’s at the university, and also its first female chemistry professor.

Annie Jump Cannon was an astronomer best known for coming up with the current system of stellar classification. Her system — ranking stars as O, B, A, F, G, K or M, with "O" being the hottest stars and "M" the coolest (the sun is a "G" star) — is still used today. She also created a saying — "Oh! Be A Fine Girl – Kiss Me!" — to help astronomers remember the letter sequence.

Despite being paid a pittance relative to the men in the lab, she was very well-regarded, received honorary degrees from several universities, including Oxford, and in 1938 Harvard appointed her to its William C. Bond chair in astronomy. Margaret Knight made her greatest contributions in an era where industry ruled. Often referred to as Lady Edison, Knight was a well-known inventor, mostly because she had the wherewithal to stand up for her rights. In 1868, Knight was working for the Columbia Paper Bag Company when she invented a machine that automatically folded and glued paper bags into the formation familiar to shoppers today. As Knight worked toward the completion of a metal prototype, a machinist named Charles Anan visited her plant. Unbeknownst to Knight, the random machinist filed for a patent for her invention.

She only learned of his deception when she applied for her own patent. Fortunately for Knight, many witnesses were on hand as she worked through her invention. This proved more than compelling in a judgment that ultimately awarded the patent—and all future royalties—to her.

Elizabeth Magie: created a board game she named “The Landlord’s Game” in the early 1900's. Some thirty years later Parker Brothers introduced the game Monopoly to American families. The game made a millionaire out of an unemployed heater salesman named Charles Darrow. He became the first board-game millionaire, developing an exact variation of the Landlord’s Game into his pitch for Parker Brothers, including Atlantic City street names and places.

Perversely, Darrow transformed Monopoly into a game that seems to celebrate dishonest business practices. On its way to retailing one of the most popular board games in history, Parker Brothers purchased Magie’s patent. When it was all said and done, the game’s original inventor would only net a rough total of about $500 for her stroke of gaming genius.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron), Lord Byron’s daughter, was one of the world’s first computer geniuses, though her role is often minimized by male historians. In 1843, the mathematically erudite Lovelace collaborated with inventor Charles Babbage at the University of London. Babbage was working on something called an Analytical Engine, an early prototype of the computer. Lovelace contributed detailed and extensive notes to Babbage’s work, particularly by articulating the way Babbage’s machine could be fed data to complete complicated math problems, or even compose complex music. These ideas may mark the earliest recorded proposition for what would eventually become computer programming and algorithms.

Today, Lovelace’s contributions are obscured by debate, most often by the dismissive and unmistakably misogynistic characterizations of her role. Like many women, her story is minimized in history, and in particular where outdated, sexist theories still persist such as “men are better than women at science.”

Margaret Keane was an American artist best known for her trademark “Big Eye” paintings, which were popular in the 1960s. The only problem: her fans in the ’60s were confident the paintings were done by her husband, Walter. He began selling his wife's paintings as his own without permission in the 1950s.

Eventually, she discovered what he was up to. When she confronted him, he used threat, intimidation, and emotional abuse to force her silence. As the works gained in popularity, Margaret continued to toil in obscurity, while he enjoyed celebrity. In 1965, the two were divorced.

Margaret revealed the truth to the public in 1975. Walter denied her allegations, which ultimately led to a surreal 1986 courtroom scene in which the two were forced into a head to head paint-off. While claiming a sore shoulder prevented him from painting, Margaret produced a perfect facsimile of her earlier works, earning the rightful claim to her works in perpetuity.

Trota of Salerno is one of the earliest victims of historiographical misogyny. An Italian doctor in the eleventh century who wrote specifically about women’s health, she has been recognized as “the world’s first gynecologist.” Her writings have remained instrumental building blocks in our knowledge about human health, and women’s health specifically.

And yet, her authorship had been cast into doubt over the ensuing centuries, entirely because historians and medical professionals were skeptical that a woman could have produced works of such accuracy and importance. This convenient doubt ultimately allowed numerous male physicians over subsequent years to cut and paste their own names over her work.

Candace Beebe Pert, while still a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, discovered the receptor that allows opiates to lock into the brain. This game-changing neuroscience revelation was so important that it led to an award—for her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder, who was recognized for his student’s achievement. When Pert wrote a letter of protest to the award committee underscoring her determinant contributions, Dr. Snyder mansplained in response, “That’s how the game is played.”

Even if one disregards the unkind remarks by unnamed critics, the portraits of both Snyder and Pert are unflattering at best. Sadly, neither fared well publicly, Snyder portrayed as egomaniacal and manipulative monster, Pert as venomous and surprisingly arrogant considering her modest scientific accomplishments. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were, primarily, hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

While not given specific credit for her discovery, in 1956 her accomplishments were professionally rewarded, becoming the first woman to be promoted to full time professor at Harvard’s faculty of Arts and Science. She was later appointed to Chair of the Department of Astronomy, making her the first woman with a department at Harvard.

"They done what they could."

Indeed. An understatement of that in many ways, since several of these intrepid women were able to expose the men who stole their thunder by continuing to work successfully without them. As well as legally, some taking these scoundrels to court for theft of intellectual property long before IP, as it is commonly referred to these days, was even on the books.

They not only did way more than they were given credit for, they accomplished far more than the puny men who stole their thunder and as much of their financial reward and public acclaim as they could.

In 2018 a singer-songwriter named Gabby Barrett came in third on "American Idol". In 2022 she wrote and performed the hit song "I Hope", a searing breakup tune with a twist as a bit of reverse pop-culture pay-back;

"I hope it goes, comes all the way around

I hope [it] makes you feel the same way

About [how] I feel about you right now"

~Gabby Barrett from "I Hope"

The backstory, told in her own words, could be the anthem for all these remarkable women, short-changed by the more prominent and powerful men in their lives yet working on steadfastly, resolutely, in continued service to the ongoing passion they had for their profession and craft.

"It was two [songwriters who are] friends of mine, Zach Kale and Jon Nite, and they came into the room last year -- Halloween of last year. They had said to me, "Let's write a breakup song where the guy does the girl bad, but the girl still kinda wishes the guy well in the end, like, 'Yeah, no bother, nothing's wrong.'"

And I was like, "Yeah, No, that's not gonna work. That can't work, because I just don't recall that [ever] happening when we get done wrong."

I've been lucky to work with and for some incredibly talented women, whose own stories resound with this same reality, and frustration with the social-hurdles they had to clear to make contributions to this world while managing to reap the benefits form their talent at the same time.

A woman's ambition is often seen and characterized in highly unflattering sexual-stereotypes that are regarded as the defining essence of manhood.

Women are born with the same "Inner Scientist" as men despite many men feeling more comfortable, perhaps even more masculine, were that not the case. For those men "They done what we couldn't" was the likely motivation, anger, shame, and more than a bit of insecurity at the root of that bit of feckless gender-cheerleading.

So my Mom was on the right track. Invoking that epitaph when it seemed relevant was her way of saying that humanity had best hope that women keep "doing what they can" regardless of who or what stands in their way.

"The Outside", as I like to refer to it, has been called "Mother Nature" as far back as written history can chronicle. And for good reason.

Let's hope she keeps it up, since having "done what she could" is what has maintained this "natural world" in which we live and thrive.

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Lessons In Solitude At Tranquility Reef

The Newfound Harbor Marine Institute at Seacamp ⒸSeacamp Association Flattops ⒸSeaamp Association SCUBA I ⒸSeacampAssociation NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNDERWATER INSTRUCTORSⒸNAUI SCUBA tanks stacked ⒸSocialDiving PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION OF DIVING INSTRUCTORS ⒸPADI SCUBA gearup at the dock ⒸSeacampAssociation Guard Lookout ⒸMaritime Risk Untelligence SCUBA sea turtle ⒸSeacamp Association Night Dive ⒸDeeperBluedotcom spotted eagle ray-school at the maldive islands, indian ocean; ⒸJardiChiles natureplcom SkyLab ⒸNASA PD-gov Spotted Eagle Rays ⒸOceanvibration The Milky Way ⒸDiscovery Previous Next "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."

Albert Einsteinwas a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self."

May Sartonwas a Belgian-American poet, novelist and memoirist. Although her best work is strongly personalised with erotic female imagery, she resisted the label of ‘lesbian writer’, preferring to convey the universality of human love. "A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free."

Arthur Schopenhauerwas a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind noumenal will. "In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself."

Laurence Sternewas an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy", "Gentleman", and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". "Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone."

Lord ByronGeorge Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS was an English poet and peer. One of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, Byron is regarded as one of the greatest English poets and scientists. "As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Henry David Thoreauwas an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. "Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it."

Liv Tyleris an American actress, producer, singer and former model. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."

Aldous Huxleywas an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books, both novels and non-fiction works, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. "To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude."

Jeanne Moreauwas a French actress, singer, screenwriter, director, and socialite. "We talk of communing with Nature, but 'tis with ourselves we commune... Nature furnishes the conditions - the solitude - and the soul furnishes the entertainment."

John Burroughswas an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the conservation movement in the United States. "Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement."

Alice Kollerwas an American writer and academic Solitude is the place of purification."

Martin Buberwas an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism. Previous Next

Lessons In Solitude At Tranquility Reef

There are times in the great outdoors when, surrounded by abundant life, I've found myself totally, naturally alone. Two very different but oh so similar events taught me what true solitude feels like. Those lessons are forever etched in my memory.

They came about when I was working as a Biologist at our Marine Station in the Florida Keys. As a licensed United States Coast Guard Boat Captain, I was ferrying 6 budding young marine-scientists to the offshore reef. And both times found us anchored in just about the same spot above the spur-and-groove coral reef at Looe Key.

Now known as the Looe Key Sanctuary Preservation Area, it was designated "The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary" in 1990.

it's a wonderfully remote setting with barely a hint of civilization any time. In the daylight the entire southern vista was the 90-miles of deep-blue Gulf Stream current, the only named thing between us and Havana Cuba. At night two tiny dots of light bookended the horizon, marking the tiny island of Key West 30 miles to the south and the faint glare of Miami's city-lights fighting their way through the 120 miles of moonless void from the north.

That first moment of overwhelming solitude occurred at dawn's early light, the crepuscular murk lifting after a nocturnal bacchanal of predatory feeding. The second taking place in the utter blackness of a moonless summer night while that feeding-frenzy was just commencing.While both trips were made to finalize our summer-students' two-weeks of study and training to earn their SCUBA certifications, the first was one of two check-out dives required for Basic SCUBA card, the second a requisite night-dive to attain the Open Water Diver certification.

The early morning foray into solitude remains undated, traceable only to summertime between the years of 1977 and 1984. But the dark night is written in the annals of history, taking place on July 11, 1979; the very night that Skylab was scheduled to fall out of orbit and come crashing back to Earth.

In neither instance was I truly alone, yet both times involved the same 26', twin-engined flattop, and a similar boat-load of teenaged would-be marine biologists. As for the solitude, the first lesson came when i was alone underwater, the second while I was alone on the deck while the rest of the boat's passengers had submerged.

My underwater moment took place 30-feet under the surface as I was setting the boar's anchor in the deep white sand of the groove separating two large spurs of coral. After i had secured the anchor. i looked up and saw a parade of three spotted eagle-rays coming out of the early morning murkiness headed right for me.

Typical of rays, bottom feeders that seek their prey on or buried just under the sand, we were destined for a collision right where I's just buried the anchor. So I ascended about 6 feet, hovering over the increasingly brighter white sand as the rising sun's rays called an end to the nocturnal feeding-frenzy of all coral reefs.

The rays split into a phalanx of three, reminding me of an aerobatics display I'd once witnessed at a 4th of July celebration put on the Navy's Blue Angels. Swimming directly underneath me as if I wasn't there, suspended in both time and 4-fathoms of ocean I watched them swim away toward the shallower water of the reef's wrack-zone. That's a coastal feature where organic material like seagrass, shells and other debris is deposited at high tide, a natural input of marine resources into a terrestrial system, providing food and habitat for a variety of coastal organisms.

As a fit 23-yo and former water-polo player in college, an experienced skin-diver, I still couldn't hold my breath much longer than 2-minutes. It seemed to happen in slow-motion, feeling like 10-minutes even though the spectacle couldn't have lasted more than 30-seconds.

Such is the nature of solitude. Time stands still during such memorable moments. My only physical reminder of its passage was the speed of their path along the bottom despite my memory that they were barely moving.

My second experience with such complete solitude was far less active.

With the divers and instructors already down, I was waiting for them to surface so i could help them aboard to get all their gear stowed, the by-then empty SCUBA-tanks secured on the rack in the center of the deck, and making everything ship-shape for the 45-minute ride back to our harbor.

The only reminder that I wasn't completely alone came from the glowing light-sticks I'd affixed to the anchor line while the crew was gearing up. Along with the occasional beam of light from the divers' underwater flashlights as they inventoried one of those massive fingers of coral.

Knowing that Skylab was poised to enter the Earth's atmosphere at any moment, I was lost in thought, fantasizing that I would be the lucky one, the only human being on Earth to witness its burning re-entry.

- What would such a fire-bomb crashing into the sea look like?
- How would I know exactly where it hit the ocean, and sank to the bottom so I could locate it later?
- Would I be featured on the evening news getting interviewed by reporters and interrogated by NASA engineers about its exact resting spot?

Since no one had been able to predict where it was going to land, not even which continent it would land closest to, my thinking was "why not me?"

With all that total blackness closing in on me from all sides, the Milky Way's belt of light was, once again, the backdrop as I scanned the skies for the first sign of SkyLab's fiery entrance. I was alone with my thoughts. I was back in that same incredible place, frozen in time while beset by its capacity to afford me such solitude. Time stood still in my presence for the second time in my 7-year tenure there.

Alone with Mother-nature in her natural classroom, she'd schooled me twice now. teaching me that solitude and isolation are very different things. You can experience both at once, but they're starkly distinct opposites.

The latter is a dark exercise, noisy cognitive-cacophony rife with the self-pity of loneliness. While the former is a quiet celebration of self, a peaceful respite from life's frenetic pursuit of things that rarely matter given the sheer-scale of the universe that embodies what I call "The Outside".

Time's inexorable control over me was palpable on both occasions.

The first featured animals that evolved some 145 million years ago, the ancestors of those spotted eagle rays coming into existence as the dinosaurs dominated our planet, The second a function of Earth's most recent evolutionary creation, a culmination of 100,00 years of human evolution, our intelligence and existential-bent to actively seek answers to the myriad mysteries obscuring the very origins of the universe itself.

That magical place had graciously afforded me two very different yet strikingly similar opportunities to see myself as part of something huge. Meaningful. even seminal, to our shared existence.

The times I spent in that same special place combined forces to help me acquire the humility I needed to continue on as a responsible scientist. They made me feel significant in my own right, puny but powerful, inoculating me against getting a swelled head and growing too big for my human-britches.

I knew then that I could serve humanity and the universe at the same time. And felt lucky that it all transpired when i was young enough to put that lesson into practice, mercifully avoiding the fate of learning it too late, long after I was physically able to effect substantive change in the world.

Reflecting back on those events, I recall the eagle rays' bright white spots framed against the ebony black skin on their backs, moving slowly like miniature submerged galaxies rotating below me. I remember the bright white glow of the Milky Way stretched above me, bridging both horizons, like I was peering down into the deep well of time itself.

Up and down, beneath and above, now and later…became the same thing as time stood still.

I recall mimicking that stillness both times, silent, motionless, as I took it all in, the world disappearing as I floated above and below its grace at the same time.

i seem to hear, more than see or feel their memory. They sound like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to me. So fitting, because I really was working a "Great Gig In the Sky", so lucky to be avoiding the "Brain Damage" of a tedious job pushing triviata around a desk anchored in rooms reeking of pointlessness.

Both moments guided me to a future freed of the fear of being forever isolated from the tranquil gift of occasional solitude.

So, I give thanks to those three Spotted Eagle Rays and the decayed orbit of Skylab, for treating me to the gift of solitude, mercifully rescuing me from the specter of being stranded in a life beset by the dread of a long chain of identical tomorrows.

Solitude, it turns out, is where you find it. My hope as a Field Guide is to help others experience that same tranquil feeling, the kind that stays with you the rest of your life!

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Beaters In Paradise

Seacamp Tent Unit ⒸSeacamp Association Bog Pine Key, Florida ⒸGoogle Maps Rust and paint-flakes ⒸAdamMantios Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Zero Entropy ⒸForbes Magazine Rusty roof ⒸWCarter CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Rust ⒸAdancedAutoParts 1964 Ford Falcon convertible Ⓒebay 1960's Lawn Chair ⒸAce Hardware Old car snapped in half. ⒸFair Use Entropy-Illustration ⒸSciTechDaily 1960s Renault 4CV ⒸWikipedia Rusted out hulk of a former ship beached in Moynaq ⒸTwoWings (CC BY-SA 3.0) entropy hyper-inflation ⒸForbes Magazine Rusty screw ⒸCreative Commons Attribution 2.0 Entropy ⒸSpacedotcom Entropy Earth 616 from Captain Marvel Vol5 5 001 ⒸPeter David, ChrisCross Beater ⒸAutowise Beater Ⓒautoplay Ely Rusted Cars ⒸMobilus_In_Mobili Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Previous Next "Only entropy comes easy."

Anton Chekhovwas a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. "The most basic human impulse is toward entropy and laziness. The less we have to do to grow spiritually, the more likely we are to do it."

Alexandra Fulleris a British-Rhodesian author. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times. "If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home."

Tamsin Greigis an English actress, narrator and comedian. She played Fran Katzenjammer in the Channel 4 sitcom Black Books, Dr Caroline Todd in the Channel 4 sitcom Green Wing, Beverly Lincoln in British-American sitcom Episodes and Jackie Goodman in the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner. "Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall."

Jerry Saltzis an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and columnist for New York magazine. "The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy."

Rex Stoutwas an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and 1975. "If you rest, you rust."

Helen Hayeswas an American actress whose career spanned 80 years. She eventually received the nickname "First Lady of American Theatre" and was the second person and first woman to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award (an EGOT) "As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion."

Antistheneswas a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. "A sword, a spade, and a thought should never be allowed to rust."

James Stephenswas an Irish novelist and poet. "I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion."

William Shakespearewas an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. "I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they're starting to rust and buckle a bit."

Jeanne Calmentwas a French supercentenarian and the oldest human whose age is documented, with a lifespan of 122 years and 164 days. "I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

Ali Smithis a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist, described as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting" "New links must be forged as old ones rust."

Jane Howardwas an American journalist, author, and educator. She worked at Life magazine from 1956 to 1972. Previous Next

Beaters In Paradise

Life as a field-biologist might sound glamorous, but every career exists within the confines of every day life. Houses, cars, pets, payments, families, groceries, taxes, …, these things all come with modern lives regardless of how we make our living.

At our Marine Station in the Florida Keys we were all fighting a losing battle against everyone's nemesis; entropy. Surrounded by the ocean on all sides, living on a peninsula on an island in a 180-mile long chain of islands, entropy confronted us mostly in the form of salt-water corrosion.

Rust was everywhere we looked, painting over it all was a perpetual line-item on our list for every work-crews.

So, it turned out that even our professional lives in paradise required us to attend yet another science-class. Chaos-Theory and Entropy.

With special emphasis on oxidation-reduction labs reminiscent of recent chemistry courses we'd all taken, and some adjunct physics lessons in the laws of thermodynamics formed the mainstays of this real-world on-the-job-training curriculum.

Documenting our battle with chaos, we had a junkyard of our own full of old boats, military-issue metal bunk-beds, bikes, tin roofing, outboard-motors, several old pickup trucks, and all manner and kind of metal-stuff rusting away to nothing almost faster than we could haul it back there.

We didn't throw much away back then due to our conservation-lifestyle and economic necessity. And made constant forays into it scrounging for parts and material for building a new piece of underwater-sampling equipment, We called it "the back 40",

Where I also happened to live for 6-months, the last available staff-housing on the property, sharing it with another instructor and 2 new interns, in a platform tent supplied with electricity from the local-grid.

The nails and screws holding the wooden tent-platform together were all rusting away, making it creaky and more than a bit bouncy. And while tucked away from the brunt of salt-spray from the nearby ocean, salt-water intrusion was still front-and center. We could deal with the instability, but salt-water attacks on the copper-wiring we depended upon for electricity to run our lamps and fans and stereos was no joke.

When it was raining, occasional shocks, and a few paranoia-filled moments of near-electrocution were just another part of our ongoing battle with entropy. Located way back in the mangroves, it was across the road from our staff parking lot.

And what a sorry parking-lot it was, filled with what we referred to as "beaters", old cars on a salt-water assisted fast-track of accelerated corrosion, fast approaching the limit even the most laconic island authority could stretch to fit even a semblance of road-legal.

With most of us just out of college, in or headed to graduate-school, new cars were simply not part of that picture. We could barely afford to fix our old cars, most of them disintegrating as we drove them to the island coffee shop or a night on the town in Key West.

US 1 was our main drag, the only road that connects all the Florida Keys, spanning 42 islands with 44 bridges. Some of us could even see good old A1A through our rusting floorboards as we drove carefully from one island to the next during our scant time-off.

In season, from December through April, traffic could get heavy for a sleepy little island with under 300 permanent residents, a parade of brand-new cars driven by tourists with actual livable incomes headed for Key West's luxury resorts. We'd admire them while gassing up our rusty jalopies right alongside all those gleaming new cars at Gabby's, our island's only gas station; a rusty old Texaco-Station itself.

There were some islanders with money, who owned the only nice cars on the island. Mostly retired executives, snowbirds as they are referred to in the South, they lived in low-lying, sturdy stucco Florida bungalows with shade trees, cool terrazzo floors, Bahamas-style ceiling fans, and screened in porches. Former seasonal fishing camps, they'd retired to them after getting sick of shoveling snow and freezing their keesters through the long northern winters.

Yet, despite their money, they also had to fight against the creeping rust that is everywhere when you live on an island less than 90 miles from Havana, Cuba. None of us could afford such things at that point in our lives, so when the season ended the local traffic was dominated by our comical fleet of #KeysCruisers, our name for our rapidly-rusting cars.

We didn't have the heart to refer to them as "beaters", even though they were. Here are a few prime examples;

Marcus, a perpetually semi-employed local misfit from who-knows-where, whose last name we never leaned, drove a 1964 Ford Falcon all over the Lower Florida Keys, a hardtop that entropy had transformed into a convertible, its roof rusted to literal nothingness.

The front bench-seat had long since rotted away from all the roofless-rain it endured, only to be replaced with a lawn-chair he bought at the local Ace Hardware. Made of those synthetically-scratchy webbing strips stretched over the aluminum frame, he used 100-pound-test fishing line to lash it to the nearly rusted out chassis. He'd drive by as if nothing was amiss, waving at anyone he saw, usually stoned out of his gourd, including the occasional Sheriff or Highway Patrol car headed for Key West or Marathon, who had become accustomed to his unconventional vehicle.

Lisa, who came to us as an intern from Vermont, later promoted to full-time Marine Science Instructor, came to us with a fairly new fire-engine-red Chevrolet Vega. After only 6 months there she came into the Staff Lounge in tears wailing about her car, which she described between heart-broken sobs to all the handymen and mechanics hanging out in there that morning as "broken in half".

They all paraded out to the parking lot, reassuring her that "cars don't just break in half", only to discover it had, indeed, broken-in half right at the frame between front and back doors. They quickly diagnosed her problem as "terminal", returning to their interrupted coffee-break insensitively making jokes about the very first car any of them had ever seen "rust itself in-half".

Michelle was a Marine Scientist from New York, trained at Cornell University, who had a similar problem. She was forced to enlist the help of Jigsaw Jimmy, our dormitory-carpenter, boat-builder and all-around handy-man, to help her hunt down the local dirtbag mechanic who had returned her car in the early morning darkness with a back seat full of car-parts, along with a posted note on the windshield reporting that "he'd been unable to restore reverse to her former forward-only transmission".

Never locating the scoundrel to recover her $200 down-payment on his $600 estimate, she adapted, driving it all over the islands for another couple of years using a strategic parking plan so she'd never have to back up. She eventually managed to secure a "legitimate" Florida State Inspection sticker for it from a local Automotive Repair Service that was not all that worried about encountering such beaters on the road, like most mainland mechanics might.

My very first summer started in a borrowed a 1962 Renault 4CV. A dear friend from Tampa, whose father had just bought her a brand-new 1978 Datsun B-210, hated the imported French rattle-trap handed down to her by her older brother. She couldn't have cared less what happened to it, so kindly lent the rusty little tin-can to me for the summer.

It lasted just long enough to break down on me at midnight on Alligator Alley, a nearly deserted highway running through the Everglades between Miami and Naples, as I was driving it back to her in late August after our summer-session was complete. A compassionate local tow-truck operator gave me $200 for it, which I used to buy a bus-ticket back to Tampa, pay her the balance, and catch my plane back home to Illinois.

Three days later I was enrolled in Graduate School, driving another beater, this time a 1968 Buck Skylark my Dad had bought the year before for my recently graduated younger brother, now ensconced in a brand-new company car with his new job; selling Motorola 2-way radios to ranchers and gas-and-oil outfits in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming.

I drove that same 10-year old car back down to the Keys the following January, having dropped out of graduate-school, taking what turned out to be a 7-year hiatus from school. While I eventually returned to earn a Masters Degree in Statistics, the car lasted only 2 more years before succumbing to the ever-present rust, hastened by a few minor fender-benders with a few Big Pine Key pine-trees and one seriously-sturdy concrete dock-bollard.

By that time it had been dubbed "The Accordian" by my fellow biologists after some low-speed, island-esque collision-compression crumpled the rear-end with a final inattentive-driving moment.

The Bluebird was a 15-foot skiff equipped with one of the institute's spare 35-hp Johnson outboards that we used to explore new teaching areas. With a tricky rusting-throttle and sloppy-steering due to salt-water intrusion, she was not the easiest boat to drive. Along with a rust-streaked transom and rickety rust-eaten walk-thru windshield, she fit right into our entropy-filled lifestyle.

A classic "water-beater", despite her state of entropy she was a sturdy craft with almost no draft, perfect for navigating the mostly shallow-waters we explored. We worked on her a lot to fend off entropy's decaying effect, using her for years to visit the coral reefs at the edge of The Gulfstream and mangrove-maze of islands dotting Florida Bay, "The Backcountry of the Lower Florida Keys".

So welcome to the world of marine biology. Spend any time near, in, on, or under the salt-water and you'll quickly learn, firsthand, just how much time you can spend trying to "fight back salt-water's inevitable corrosion".

The bigger the boat or ship, from Zodiacs full of biologists or ORV's, oceanographic research vessels with hundreds of them plumbing the depths of the ocean's mystery, the more headaches you'll discover trying to slow down entropy's relentless, universally true sprint to "disorder, chaos, and ultimate ruin".

We were in the same boat, so to speak, each of us aging according to that same entropic game-plan. With every passing year, we quickly recognized that none of us was as strong, nimble, or even clever as we'd been only the year before.

Now, some 45 years later, I'm afraid entropy has left its indelible mark on me, far different from the 22 year old, lean-mean-marine-biology machine I was back then. There are many old jokes about aging scientists; as a trained biologist, statistician, and software-engineer I qualify for several.

Old biologists never die, they just ferment into alcohol solutions.

Old statisticians never die, they just undergo a transformation.

Old software engineers never die, they just get deprecated.

All joking aside, what Entropy can't seem to corrode is one's passion for #TheOutside, as I like to call it. In fact, i think it's enhanced mine. Perhaps the very chaos entropy catalyzes intrigues me the most.

The passing years of professional life have exhausted me of stuffy rooms filled with stuffed-shirts discussing their plans for a future over-stuffed with fantasy and precious little wisdom.

The great outdoors is calling to me, like "Buck" in Jack London's most famous book "The Call of The Wild". Mother Nature's swan-song appears to be impervious to Entropy's ways,

She's calling me back, enjoining me to help others get out there and start forming their own "Tales From The Outside".

Michelle is an accomplished Naturalist and career High School Teacher in the Magnet Science-Marine Science-Molecular Biology programs at Everett High School in Everett, WA.

She is an avid hiker, kayaker, and all around Naturalist, having taught Marine Science coast-to-coast. from her native New York, to Maine, to the Floria Keys, to the Pacific Northwest.

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wind in pam trees ⒸPD Waterspout in the Maldive Islands ⒸPD the means season NHMI-Seacamp on Big Pine Key, FL ⒸMarkie Knolls the mean season unknown beach ⒸPD The Mean Season Maldive Islands ⒸPD The Mean Season Florida Keys ⒸPD The Mean Season Key West, FL ⒸPD Spanish Harbor Channel east of Big Pine Key ⒸPD NHMI-Seacamp Harbor and Shark P at Coupon Bight; Big Pine Key, DL ⒸGoogle Maps The Newfound Harbor Keys ⒸGoogle Maps multiple waterspouts ⒸPD lower keys, big pine key, and coupon bight ⒸUSCG Navigational Charts hurricane from above ⒸNASA Hurricane Ian's path 9/25/2022; ⒸThe WeatherChannel "The Mean Season" in South Florida ⒸNOAA Cumulus congestus cloud. ⒸWikipedia 10 waterspouts ⒸPD The Mean Season from 7-mile Bridge; Marathon, FL ⒸStateOfFlorida Florida Keys Waterspouts ⒸPD-Gov USFWS Previous Next " Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, Ease after war, death after life does greatly please."

Edmund Spenserwas an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. "Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethewas a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic "I don't believe in a biological apocalypse, but I think there is stormy biological weather ahead as the human population continues to grow."

Richard Prestonis a writer for The New Yorker and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction. "Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable."

Diane Ackermanis an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world "Anyone who says they're not afraid at the time of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a little bit of both."

Anderson Cooperis an American broadcast journalist and political commentator from the Vanderbilt family. He is the primary anchor of the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360° "or New Yorkers, late October 2012 was a moment when something fundamental altered. If there were any climate change deniers in the five boroughs before Hurricane Sandy, I don't think there were too many left afterward."

Bill de Blasiois an American politician who served as the 109th mayor of New York City from 2014 to 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he held the office of New York City Public Advocate from 2010 to 2013. "Palms are like cockroaches. They were here long before us, and they'll be here long after us. They're the only things standing after a hurricane."

Robert Irwin is an American installation artist who has explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space. "The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.:

Carl Hiaasenis an American journalist and novelist. "Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo."

Mickey Spillanewas an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. "It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck."

Charles Caleb Coltonwas an English cleric, writer and collector, well known for his eccentricities. Previous Next

030. The Mean Season

There's a comforting silence that falls over a familiar space that's usually bustling with activity, like schools, museums, stadiums, theaters, marine-science field-stations,…

and summer camps.

Seasons come and go, but when it's time, even the busiest seasonal schedule gives way to a slower pace. If it's situated in a really cool spot, the silence is even more rife with portent.

Places like that seem to harbor all that energy into an expectation, potential energy if you will, ready to match its former active state as one season gives way to another.On this day, it happened at our marine station in the Florida Keys, the three month, three-session summer-camp for teenagers was behind us, all the marine-science classes finished, the labs completed, the SCUBA certifications earned, the pleasantly noisy sounds of smallcraft, sailing, windsurfing, and skin-diving classes now mere echoes of a recent, now changed past.

I'd just finished overseeing the post-summer cleanup, getting the place ready for Fall's programs, shorter more directed curricula designed around school visits spanning grade-schoolers to college students. List for the work crews were now temporarily complete, the staff paid and hustled off to their own college campuses around the country, and the peace of our beautiful new home-front restored, if only for a while.I was left there with a few others as the caretaker, along with a skeleton-crew of equally exhausted cohorts. For a summer program-administrator, marine-science Instructor, and budding biologist this was the sweetest of times in an already sweet gig. Very few duties, lots of free time surrounded by water, boats available for exploring on our own, returning to a more naturally slow-paced sub-tropical beauty…

now bereft of all the hoopla, excitement, and necessarily well-regulated timetable set to a ship's-bell imperiously pealing marking the onset of every aspect of our day from wakeup, meals, class, to lights-out. We'd buttoned down the property, prepared for the storms, completed our summer's work, and were just beginning to settle into a new routine.

But on this fateful day, the beginning of what South Florida has come to call "the Mean Season", things had changed. The usual blue-sky and puffy clouds had suddenly given over to dark skies filled with threat, its strange green cast reflecting a changing of the weather-guard.A Hurricane was coming. Not close, still far away, it was nonetheless creeping in our direction from the east and south. The atmosphere was changing as the angry storm built, moving across the summer-sun warmed Caribbean water, low-pressure building, stealing our usual sky full of fresh clean blue-air from us while leaving moist, stifling, and green-hued heaviness in its place.

It was the last day of August. And while hurricane season had been with us for three-months, no such storm had forced us to evacuate our vulnerable island haven that summer. But September loomed with it's annually frightening volatility, the month known as the height of Hurricane-season.

The Mean Season was upon us.

A darkness usually associated with a typically spectacular sunset fading in the west as dark overtakes its fiery-orange sky had descended upon us. But at two o-clock in the afternoon the day had taken on an entirely different timbre than an evening sunset.

The grey skies touching the warmth of the shallow waters that surrounded us was reflecting its green character back up into the sky.

Not bright, no longer unmercifully beating down upon us as usual, the sun was still up there fighting its way through the angry looking clouds to make everything seem to be on the edge of some great change.

So the five of us left to "maintain the integrity of the vessel", as one of our more colorful local characters had put it, mounted the steps of the girl's dormitory to afford us an elevated perspective of the shallow-bay named Coupon Bight.No more than 15 feet east of us, bordered by Big Pine Key's mangroves with the bigger island's shoreline of mangrove wetlands to the north and the five mangrove-lined Newfound Harbor Keys to the south, it forms a backwards "L" open to the south-west right where we were situated, by this time of the year filled with shallowly tepid, nearly hot water.All of a sudden, right in front of us, the oddly-hued green skies gave birth to seven waterspouts bouncing around the confines of the bight, contained by the bay's cooler shores to pinball across its surface like a group of rowdy kids just released from a long day in school.

Essentially small tornadoes, waterspouts are not uncommon in the summer sun-warmed shallow water of the Florida Keys. They form fast, descend like fingers sticking out of a dark cloud-bottom, reaching a faint spiraling digit all the way down to the touch the water itself.Exploding in visible plumes of spray as its cyclonic fury is taken out on the surface of formerly calm water, they form quickly then immediately begin to move erratically in unpredictable paths.Difficult to dodge if you're caught anywhere near them in a boat, they bend and twist as if tethered to an enraged kite. Then, just as quickly, despite being born to rage against the calm for their entire, albeit very short lives, they retreat back to the clouds, perhaps to form again in a few minutes.

According to Wikipedia;

''In the common form, a waterspout is a non-supercell tornado over water having a five-part life cycle;

formation of a dark spot on the water surface, spiral pattern on the water surface, formation of a spray ring, development of the visible condensation funnel, and ultimately, decay."

It wasn't raining, although there was visible precipitation coming out of its "mother-cloud". What meteorologists call "virga", a dry storm, we were witnessing rain that evaporates before it hits the ground. And in seven different places at the same time.

It was hard to take it all in, things changing so fast our minds couldn't keep up with the fleeting display of natural chaos-within-order.

"The Mean Season" was taking on new meaning for us, the notion of "rain" we'd all known from early childhood was being redefined before our eyes.

Such is the character of an atmosphere in flux, reacting to Earth's own spinning axis, its cosmic tilt replacing the heat of summer sun with a cooler nature. Months before the onset of winter, the beginning of Autumn heralds those times. Despite Fall's official start still three weeks out, in a moment of jabberwocky truth we were witness to a higher-truth, when rain no longer meant you'd be getting wet, the sun no longer represented automatic sunburn, and spinning storms raging on the ocean's surface could be observed calmly without hasty retreats to higher ground.

At least not during this storm, not really a storm but a natural brewing pot of localized weather.The shallow-bay's hot water was getting sucked up into the waterspout's vortex, then super-cooled as it quickly gained thousands of feet of altitude, only to fall again as the abrupt temperature change even at a mere 500 feet feet made it dense enough to overcome the updraft as the Bight's relatively hot water, its source mere minutes before, evaporated it before becoming actual, official rain.

As we stood there experiencing the contradiction of a system in flux, our very Earth vacillating between summer and fall, a respectful awestruck hush fell over us.The silence of the place that recently rang with the cacophony of teenagers in the midst of discovery had been replaced by the silence of rain that wasn't rain, cyclonic weather with no cyclone within a thousand miles, sub-tropical sky that was green instead of its usual crystal-blue, the puffy white clouds of promise giving way to dark clouds filled with malevolent portent, and us;

a small group of young adults in training as teachers being privately tutored in new lessons by Mother Nature herself.

No one spoke, we just stood there and watched, felt, smelled, and listened to her spontaneous lesson about life on Spaceship Earth.

She is the schoolmarm of our ever mysterious home, the same one we'd come to depend on over the years, as comfortably familiar as an old pair of flip-flops. Yet, as we'd aged ourselves, moving from being kids sent to school to learn the ways of the world having only recently graduated to adulthood, she was now schooling us with reality instead of lifeless books and the boring drone of lectures.She was now using the sounds and feel of the natural world, imploring us to read the skies and the waves and the feel of the air itself rather than dead-books written by long-dead scholars.

The Mean-Season was giving us new meaning to our lives, the many mood-swings of our human tempestuousness validated by the natural world undergoing very much the same sort of change.

This vexing confusion was revealing itself as the only real constant in yet another wonderful day on Earth.

What we were feeling was the fellowship of humanity, following the generations who preceded us into the very same unknown territory of life. The only true mantra of life we'd ever hear was chanting to us from above…

t'was always thus!

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San Miguel Island rookery ⒸwwwVCstardotcom Point Bennett Research Station 1999 ⒸPD-IS (NPS) San Miguel Island California Sea Lion Rookery ⒸPD-US (NPS) San Miguel signage ⒸNadia Drake:WIRED) Dragnet ⒸIMDB CSL rookery ⒸNMFS George Antonelis PD-US California and Steller Sea Lion hybrids Adult Female California Sea Lion ~250 lbs; ⒸWikimedia PD-US (NPS) Previous Next "Camille: You got nice eyes...for a cop. [She then blows cigarette smoke in Joe's face] Detective Joe Friday: And I bet your mother had a loud bark.”

Detective Joe FridayCharacter on Dragnet ""Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent."

NarratorDragnet, Season 1 "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."

Ralph W. Sockmanwas the senior pastor of Christ Church (United Methodist) in New York City, United States who gained considerable prominence in the U.S. as the featured speaker on the weekly NBC radio program, National Radio Pulpit, which aired from 1928 to 1962. "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."

Agatha Christiewas an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."

Arthur Conan Doylewas a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. "Next time you want to make the news, step in front of a bus."

Det. Joe Friday: Fictional Detective from the 1960's TV series Dragnet. "Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge."

Isaac Bashevis Singerwas a Polish-born American Jewish writer who wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated himself into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. Previous Next

Inner Science and the San Miguel Marauder

I can still hear him…Detective Joe Friday…deadpan…serious…full of the portent that comes from solving mysteries for a living. It reminds me of the crimes and subsequent investigation of "The Marauder of San Miguel Island"

"This is the island. From one day to the next it's almost always the same. It's made that way. Counting the pinnipeds, there's about 50,000 of them…in June."

Ok, OK…I'll drop the Dragnet drama. But this story is not so different from that old 1960's TV crime-series.

For one thing, San Miguel Island is just 70 miles from Los Angeles, directly west of detective Joe Friday's beat. And this case also involved attractive females being beaten to death by an unknown assailant.

It turns out that for years on this westernmost Channel Island, 55 miles off the Ventura County coastline, marine biologists were baffled by the mysterious springtime deaths of adult female sea lions, all found clumped in one cove off the northwest shore of the island.

And much like a typical Dragnet plot, had gone officially undetected for some time, Until, of course, the suffocated and flattened bodies started piling up.

The main difference? The victims weren't human, they were California Sea Lions. Females only. Always of breeding age, from 4 to 20 years old. Unraveling the mystery would require crime-solving skills much like those of Joe Friday. And a dragnet, of course, just not in LA. And not conducted by the police but by scientists…marine biologists.

Because figuring out the identity of the San Miguel Marauder was not an easy mystery to decipher. In anthropomorphic terms, it was the work of a serial-killer, a rapist, and habitual criminal. Calendar-obsessed, the season and scene of the crime never changed the Marauder's MO, the modus operandi, never wavering.

That the bodies started appearing every summer, late summer, was a seminal clue that led experts to the crowded annual mating beaches of the San Miguel Island in the first place. While not detectives, trained marine scientists work a lot like them when presented with sudden mystery. The two professions might differ in terms of their charter and day-to-day duties both routinely call on their #InnerScientist to help generate new clues and data to lead them toward a solution.

Enlisting the help of the United States Coast Guard and Channel Islands National Park Rangers, local marine mammalogist Robert DeLong played Joe Friday's role, setting up a Dragnet of his own; a multi-channel surveillance system trying to deduce the identity of the San Miguel Marauder.

They watched fishing boats from the ocean and the air, suspecting that fishermen might be shooting or clubbing the sea lions. On top of the surveillance, biologists did necropsies--the animal equivalent of an autopsy--on the bodies of about 30 female sea lions in the spring of 1994. But the tests yielded no definitive clues about the perpetrator's identity, and the puzzle went unsolved until the next spring.

“Nothing seemed to fit,” said Chief Ranger Jack Fitzgerald. Suffocated females assaulted during mating season, all suffering multiple broken-bones, their bodies nearly flattened in some cases, the investigation required evidence and the detective work required to discover it. Along with deep scientific inference, pattern-matching, and "what else could possibly explain this?" reasoning.

Then, one day in the midst of all this effort, the culprit was caught in "flagrante delicto", as the detectives put it. It was DeLong himself who happened to be monitoring the area just offshore in a patrol boat that day.

“I saw him in the middle of a copulation with an adult female,” DeLong said. “He suffocated her. She was still alive when he dismounted, but died later.”

He theorized that the "Marauder" was a hybrid was born of a Steller Sea Lion father and a California Sea Lion mother who somehow survived the experience. San Miguel Island has traditionally been the southernmost range for the Stellers, but a radical drop in their numbers that far south the last two decades had left the Channel Islands virtually devoid of appropriate mates for the hybrid.

A mature male blend of the smaller California sea lions and a Steller sea lion could weigh up to 1,800 pounds. The average weight for the female California sea lion is about 220 pounds. While the female is used to mating with male California sea lions ranging from 700 to 1,000 pounds, the giant hybrid is simply too large for her.

But the sheer size of the “fluke of nature,” as DeLong calls him, is not the only factor involved. Mixed signals and bad timing were also to blame. With no Steller females to mate with, he turned instead to the smaller Californias. And not only is he oafish about it, his timing was off.

Stellers start to breed in early May, whereas California Sea Lions. start to mate in mid-June, usually a week after giving birth. “His timing is more Steller than Californian,” DeLong said.

Because the California Sea Lion females weren’t ready to mate, likely to still be pregnant at the time and not in estrous, they probably didn't respond properly when approached by the hybrid. Typically, the male mounts the female and restrains her down with his weight until she sends a signal that she is ready. Then he lifts himself up on his fore-flippers, easing the load on her.

“If that male were to support his weight on his fore-flippers rather than lying prone, the females could survive,” DeLong said. But the hybrid giant apparently never gets the signal, and his poor female mates end up squashed.

DeLong said there is no way of knowing if the hybrid has mated successfully in the past. It is quite possible that he is sterile.

“The important thing that needs to be said is that he is a mistake of nature,” DeLong said. “This is not the way evolution occurs. If there are any progeny, those progeny are going to make those same mistakes he is making now.”

DeLong's explanation, expressed in 1996, was reinforced in 2002 more research emerged with evidence supporting DeLong's theory.

The presence of intergeneric hybrids is well known among the otariids. The incidence of hybridization is perhaps not surprising given that this family of pinniped's breed in high-density, polygynous, and occasionally sympatric colonies; have significant vagrant tendencies, and, like many marine mammals, possess low genetic variability.

Occasional hybrids have been detected all along the eastern Pacific coasts, South and North. From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Several species of Fur Seals, California Sea Lions, and Steller Sea Lions are the usual species involved. Their few, concentrated, and distantly isolated rookeries, alone, account for these species being particularly vulnerable to this naturally unnatural mistake.

Sympatric, "taking place without geographical separation", says it well. Seasonally over-populated island beaches teeming with hormone-filled animals driven naturally to extend their genes to the next generation accounts for much of the coincidental mistakes. The sexually-dimorphic and testosterone-filled larger Males in close proximity to the species-specific, smaller estrogen-exuding Females fills in the gaps.

We'll never know the identity, species, or hybrid-genetics of the San Miguel Marauder since the female California Sea Lions' gruesome deaths stopped in the late 1990's. The culprit was suspected to have been 15 years old by then, given the timeline of the suffocated and flattened females alerting the Channel Islands National Park Rangers to those violent events in the first place.

The area's capable predators, primarily White Sharks and Orcas, could well have made him part of their natural diet; young or aging animals too inexperienced or weekend by age to escape their attacks.

Or perhaps his own relentless aggressive matting habit did him in. Mating with the wrong species just when other mature Bull males were assembling, fighting for territory before the females arrived to give birth, then mate, might have made him particularly vulnerable to the rare, although not unheard of mortal pre-mating combat.

So, no experimental designs were concocted. No experimental panels were run. No specific papers were ever published, and no grants or research funds were expended other than National Park Service budgets applied to the monitoring effort. It required little more than spotting a hulking Steller Sea Lion male seeking mates amidst the hordes of smaller California Sea Lion females in their rookery areas.

Just like actual scientist Robert DeLong practiced to identify him originally. But their collective #InnerScientists were at work.

It's our collective birthright, part of our shared humanity, that accounts for homo Sapiens' ultimate domination of the world's ecosystems. It's our only truly unique distinctive adaptation from the rest of the animal kingdom.

We routinely seek answers to questions as mundane as "What should I wear today?" and "What should I make for dinner tonight?" to far more complex queries like "What is causing our increasing global temperature?" and "How did life emerge from lifelessness?"

All require the services of our #InnerScientist. Tapping into it bears deeper consideration than most of us tend to expend. Consciously consulting this "little but incredibly wise voice in our heads" to help us navigate life's complicated issues requires more than mere consciousness.

Here's one way to start that process. Ask yourself "Who taught me to speak when I was a baby?"A clue is…it wasn't your parents, siblings, doting aunts and uncles. They all talked to you, but in a foreign language to you at the time. When you finally arrive at the correct answer, "I did!", you're well on your way.

You listened to them. Or, more correctly, your #InnerScientist did. No one taught you to speak. They just treated you like you could speak. In fact, given the inarticulate nature of some of our family members, some of them likely slowed you down for a while.

Then one day, all of a sudden and to everyone's great delight, you said your first word out loud. Whether it was "Mama, Dada, Dog-Dog, or even SpongeBob", not only did you say it out loud, you managed to work it into the conversation contextually as well.

So, the next time you find yourself in a new place, a new environment, a wilderness area unfamiliar to you…make such a person-to-person call to your #InnerScientist.

As untrained as you might be in science, your capacity to generate keen inference from data, if only the shallowest of observations of the natural world before you is possible because you are a born Scientist.

Never lose touch with that notion. I promise that you'll be glad the two of you are still very much connected somewhere up there in all that gray-matter you inherited at the very moment of your conception!

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Previous Next "The Fibonacci Sequence turns out to be the key to understanding how nature designs... and is... a part of the same ubiquitous music of the spheres that builds harmony into atoms, molecules, crystals, shells, suns and galaxies and makes the Universe sing.”

Guy Murchiea writer about science and philosophy: aviation, astronomy, biology, and the meaning of life. "People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect."

Samuel Butlerwas an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903 . "Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it.`"

Georg Simmelwas a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic, nfluential in the field of sociology. His neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking "what is society?" "When I went to art school in Romania, we learned the Golden Ratio Technique Theory, which taught us that when you draw a portrait and want to show an emotion, you change the eyebrows. They are the most important feature on the face."

Anastasia Soares a Romanian businesswoman, and the CEO and founder of Anastasia Beverly Hills, known as the "Eyebrow Queen". "Every unique thing in nature is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world."

Alejandro Mos Rierais a Spanish polymath born in 1978 in Oviedo where he studied History of Art at the University of Oviedo Previous Next

When Fibonacci Went Whale-Watching

Things that seem simple rarely are. So understanding how anything in the natural world "works" requires a deep-dive into complexity. And whose ultimate explanation often comes back to us seeming "quite simple".The beauty of this sometime tortuous cycle lives on in the form of "DUH, why didn't we think of that before?" Humility before the mystery…now that's SCIENCE.

Consider a family outing on a whale-watching junket. What could seem more simple, more fully accessible to everyone…from the smallest to the tallest, youngest to oldest?

During your summer-vacation to the shore, someone realizes it's whale-watching season…off the coast of Nantucket, or Monterey Bay, or Southern Alaska, The Azores, New Zealand's Milford Sound, Hawaii, The Virgin Islands, and Mexico's famous Sea of Cortez.So, out you all go for a simple afternoon hoping to catch a few glimpses of these majestic marine-mammals in the natural habitat; feeding, socializing, breaching, blowing whale-snot over the entire boat as they surface nearby, and to the delight of the youngest members of the family…spotting a Blue Whale in the distance because the boat just passed a huge stain of its recently deposited whale-poop still floating on the surface!

As you talk among yourselves between the moments of incredible natural wonder, the silence of the sea comes over the boat, the soft hm of excited human voices lingering in the air as everyone chats about what they just saw while the Boat Captain or resident Naturalist announce some technical details that are relevant to the last cetacean-moment.

As you all take a break in the crisp sunshine and briny ocean air, munching on some trail-mix and cooling off with an iced-tea or lemonade from the boat's canteen…

what do you hear but words like "Fibonacci Numbers" and "Golden Mean" coming from nearby. You look around, but no one is there. Who could it be, you wonder? Who would be talking mathematics on a whale-watching trip?

And then you realize, it's the spirit of Fibonacci himself, present in every natural setting just waiting for the opportunity to remind us of the complex mysteries that comprise the natural world, all manifested in what appears to be the simplest, everyday activities.

Who knew that the bubble-netting Humpback Whales you just saw fishing in a group was as complex, even more-so, than you could have imagined climbing aboard the "Blackfin", my favorite whale-watching outfit and Cetacean Researchers in Monterey Bay, California.It wasn't until very recently, when some intrepid researchers from Alaska, to Maine, to New Zealand started using drones to capture overhead footage of feeding humpback whales, discovered that those "simple" bubble nets" are actually sophisticated spiral fish-traps. Not nets, but much more complex underwater-structures built of air and sound forming concentric Fibonacci Spirals.

This fleeting, temporary complex of bubbles and sound serve as a corral, if you will, for the Humpback Whale's favorite food; hordes of tiny zooplankton called "Krill" and huge schools of tiny sardines and anchovies that are themselves feasting on the abundance of phytoplankton as cold-deep ocean and warm-surface waters come together on the continental shelf just offshore, creating an incredibly rich mix of nutrients that literally bloom with life.The spectacle everyone came hoping to witness starts with the bubble-netting Humpback Whales, whose incredible cooperative fishing technique corral their food at the surface. Usually it's the tail-end of the cycle as 4 or 5 sets of huge gaping, baleen-filled mouths break the surface at the same time.

They often catch the whale-watchers unaware, seeming to come out of nowhere. Only the more experienced among the crew and amateur biologists who've been there before saw and heard the mass of bubbles, the whales' acoustic and air-filled fish-net, gurgling to the surface before they all came crashing in to gobble down all the trapped krill and fish.

The first unmistakable sign is the loud sound of breaking water, their heads now protruding far above the surface, then falling back in as water gushes out of their mouths. This is often accompanied by giving a great sigh, a huge exhalation, after their deep dive blowing bubbles, vocalizing, and cooperative group-swimming they used to construct their complex fish-trap.

The whales swam as a group up into the ring-of-bubbles they had just built, filling their huge pleated throats with up to 5,000 gallons of water, crustaceans, and fish, then filtering it out with their baleen. Think of the baleen, their specialized filter-feeding apparatus, as feathery teeth. Made of collagen more like our fingernails than the hard enamel of teeth, its adapted to collecting the sea-food while allowing all the water to drain out the sides of their mouths as they swallow the huge amount of food their bubble-net yielded.

The repetitive, almost not-stop feeding of the Humpbacks sometimes creates what's come to be known as bait-balls, a tightly packed school of fish now trapped at the surface, vainly using their schooling trick, known as murmuration, to confuse the highly agitated and hungry assemblage of predators looking at them as an easy meal.

This often creates a highly localized opportunity for somewhat larger fish who recognize the whales' group-feeding event, and were hanging around just to mooch off the leftovers, feeding ravenously on the fresh and highly nutritious mass of now confused and dazed prey. Sometimes they are joined by even larger fauna like seals, sea-lions, dolphins, porpoise, the billfish like Marlin and Swordfish, sharks like Blues, Makos, and Great Whites.

And don't forget the birds, their raucous cacophony from above a constant reminder that they eat seafood, too. Attacking the bait-ball from above come flocks of pelicans, sea-gulls, shearwaters, and cormorants, putting the fish into a nearly inescapable two-front battle with voracious predators after them from below and above.

As they all feast on the remains of the whale's now dispersed bubble-net, the whales themselves have since sounded again, a term that means commencing a deep-dive. Often starting with its huge tail-flukes projecting into the air as they go vertical to descend to initiate yet another round of bubble-netting.

This cycle of submerging, blowing bubbles, vocalizing with what's thought to be a form of acoustic weaponry, effectively augmenting the curtain of air-bubbles forming their trap, then rising in the water column swimming in roller-coaster worthy tracks effectively trapping their prey inside the bubble-net, is what they came to those nutrient-rich waters to accomplish in the first place.

Highly migratory, the Humpback Whales feed voraciously, sometimes up to 22 hours a day, only in the summer. It's this cycle of constant feeding that will sustain them on their annual Fall migration to warmer waters in the south where they give birth to their young in far less nutrient-rich winter-waters closer to the equator.

And if you happen revel in the cleverness of humanity for devising inventions like drones outfitted with digital-cameras that help us understand the natural-world even better than ever before, you wouldn't be alone.

These technological wonders, digital-tags equipped with hydrophones, accelerometers, and GPS-devices, all overseen by and documented using drones have effectively changed our ability to witness, analyze, and discover new things about the underwater world we simply couldn't accomplish even 10 years ago.

But you might also hear Fibonacci lecturing you softly about your arrogance, daring to brag about synthetic technology while surrounded by nature's incredible array of seemingly-simple complexity.

"Non così veloce, amico mio"…"Not so fast, my friend!" he might say.That drone's propellers made its novel design possible, their performance enhanced by application of the Phi Ratio, the convergence point of the Fibonacci Series. Increased efficiency results because the propellers replicate nature's method of moving fluids along the path of least resistance, consuming the least amount of necessary energy while delivering near optimal levels of thrust.

And while the Fibonacci Spiral is a bit complex to remember, and most cameras are still not outfitted with a spiral as a built-in grid overlay option, what they do have is the rule of thirds. Turn your camera's rule of thirds overlay option on and place your subject on the intersection of the lines. Now move your camera slightly, so your subject is a bit farther out than the intersection.

Those photographs will not only be more aesthetically pleasing, digital analysis systems will be presented with far more analytically-cogent information for subsequent research into the natural patterns captured. Fibonacci to the rescue…again!

Because he's right; there's nothing new under the sun, for us at any rate.

The ancestors of today’s Cahuilla Indians built spiral-shaped fish-traps along the shoreline of Lake Cahuilla. Their innovative handiwork was dug up by archeologists in the southern end of their range, which covered about half of Riverside County and stretched across the Mojave Desert north into San Bernardino County of Southern California.

Using ancient brain-corals from a time when the ocean covered their land, these fish-traps are arrayed in spirals, unique among humanity's rich history of shoreline fish-traps. Every other fish-trap documented so far has been shaped like a wedge to capitalize on the gradual decent of most shorelines' tidal range, designed to leverage the twice-daily high-and-low tides, trapping food-fish in wedge-shaped weirs usually built out of nearby tree-branches as the water receded leaving the trapped fish nowhere to go.

Catching the fish in low-to-no-water tide-pools means they had to be checked twice-daily to collect those fish that couldn't escape the falling tide's trap. Not the case when applying Fibonacci's Spiral, however.

Inexplicably, the clever ancestors of these Cahuilla Indians appear to be the only humans to have applied Fibonacci's formula to confound the fish who swam into its spiral-shaped puzzle. They somehow figured out that the fish are apparently unable to figure out how to reverse their entry and find a way back out of it.

Such fish traps are thought to be able to sustain their catch for days, making them both efficient and a form of early conservation, no fish wasted due to spoilage in tide-pools shrunken to dried-up pools by smaller tides and the blistering Southern California sun. And full of fresh fish every time they came back to check on them!

Meanwhile, back at the whale-watch, the simple afternoon outing gives way to the evening, the whales still feeding non-stop, your family's stomachs begin growling for their own dinner. Making your way back to the dock, seeing the Humpbacks' flukes framed against the setting sun, your new shipmate, Mr. Fibonacci fades into the background, perhaps saying goodbye with his own whispered thoughts regrading the human condition.

Known by his nickname Fibonacci, Leonardo Pisano was a member of the Bonacci family, Fibonacci a shortening of the Latin "filius Bonacci". Used in the title of his book "Libar Abaci", it means "the son of Bonaccio". His father's name was Guglielmo Bonaccio, so "Fi'-Bonacci" is like the English names of Robin-son and John-son.

Apparently humble in his own nature, he sometimes used the name "Bigollo" to refer to himself, which may mean "good-for-nothing traveller". That humility is another wise reminder for us as a recipe for a grateful-life.

The natural world can seem simple to us out of our sheer familiarity with its regular rhythms. Scientists might come to know something of the deep complexity underlying everything worthy of deeper study, yet even when they manage to expose some complexity inherent to the natural world it often comes back as the realization of "Mother-Nature" concocting a simple solution to a complex problem.

A seasoned traveller himself, as you sit down to dinner and relish the day you spent with your family observing the beauty and hidden complexity of the world, take a moment to toast him. Along with all those who came before us, their collective insight into the natural world a lesson in appreciating and understanding the very nature of the world we inhabit.Who knows, you might just hear him toast you back. "Cin-Cin" he might say in his native Italian.

Which means "I Salute You', the toast itself a reference to the pleasing harmonics of two glasses clinking together in shared fellowship…

yet another Fibonacci-centric phenomenon in our ever wondrous natural world!

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Blue Whale Scat. ⒸJason Isley Getty Images in Scientific Americam Wolf Scat; ⒸOregon US Dept of Fish and Wildlife What Shat That; ⒸMatt Pagett New Holland Publishers Pty, Limited, 2007 Mammal Scat of North America; ⒸAcorn Naturalists Owl Scat; ⒸMuseum And Archives, Cortes Island British Columbia Poop Cycle; ⒸBlue Ocean Society For Marine Conservation Phytoplankton; ⒸNOAA MESA Project Barn Owl scat; ⒸBarn Owl Survey Dung Beetle; ⒸAchiri Bitamsimli Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Krill swarm, Gulf of the Farallones; ⒸJamie Hall Krill ooop; ⒸMcCork Studios: Nature Communications Blue Whale scat; ⒸElliott Hazen under NOAA:NMFS permit 16111 Previous Next "Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?"

John Doeis a best-selling and prolific American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy drama"), such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. "Tomorrow I'll take you out to see the gold beetles. They're amazing: they eat dirt and poop out gold ore."

Lev Grossmanis an American novelist and journalist who wrote The Magicians Trilogy: The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014). He was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine from 2002 to 2016. "Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That's bird poop, too."

Kurt Vonnegutwas an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works, and further collections have been published after his death. "You can't polish a turd”.

Kenneth Turnbullis a Scottish copywriter whose copy has generated tens-of-millions in sales in some of the internet’s most fiercely-competitive markets. He has been personally trained by (and been a ghost-writer for) copywriting legend, John Carlton. "Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant."

Guy Kawasaki is an American marketing specialist, author, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line in 1984 "Bird Poop in the mouth is always a surprise."

Craig Benzineis an American video producer, musician, and vlogger better known by his YouTube channel name of WheezyWaiter "And it's been so long since most of our boys have sailed they hardly know a poop deck from a chamber pot!"

Andrew Petersonis an American Christian musician and author, who plays folk rock, roots rock, and country gospel music. "Do you ever get the feeling that a toilet is the portal between two worlds?"

Josh Sternan American author relocated to Monteal, Canada, "Because I needed to shed some pounds and the metric system is free." "When visiting the Grand Canyon, make sure you hike into the canyon. And be careful not to fall or step in mule poop."

McKenna Shayauthor of "Rainbow Zebra; a children's storybook written and illustrated by children" Previous Next

Scat!

It's a 19th Century word, once thought of as a uniquely American euphemism, but turns out to have its roots In Great Britain. From the word root "scatter", or maybe just taken from the intended target, "cat", perhaps it's not all that curious you never hear anyone say "Scat" to a dog.

I've seen videos of people out roaming "the wilderness" shout "Scat" when confronted by mountain lions, cats, even cheetahs…but never wolves, bears, or even komodo dragons. What's also amazing is how often it works.

But Field Guides are not in the business of shooing away wildlife. The best among us are arch-proponents of guiding natural experiences, so scaring off wildlife is just as wrong as enticing them in with food or calls. But sometimes even they can't avoid the "Shoo-Complex".Grizzly bears are well-known for making bluff-charges. as are African and Asian Elephants. Mountain Lions, too, but are also notorious for quick departures after you make yourself seem larger with lots of accompanying noise. And I can still hear the shrieks of "shoo" as my 5th-grade class encountered a "cloak-room" full of bats swooping all around our heads one morning in that 40-year old brick-building.

But, here, SCAT refers to "waste matter". Better know as "poop". Scatology, as the study of "poop" is called, has its own etymology. Different, despite also dating back to the 19th century, it stems from the Greek word, skōr, or skat, which means ('dung'), plus -logy ('to study').

As distasteful as it sounds to some, to a biologist "scat" is a valuable research tool. So much data can be gleaned form studying it closely. A critter's diet, the manner in which they consume their food, details about its digestion and even individual health, when they were there, and even their DNA, opening up a wide complement of genetic and evolutionary data.

Field Guides can use it to help determine which critters are in the area. Hunters and Trackers use it help understand their prey's schedules and even territorial range. The animals themselves use it to mark territory, and even challenge unwelcome border encroachments.Once, in Yellowstone National Park, just above the Lamar Valley Ranch home of the Druid Hills Wolfpack, we saw a coyote scat on top of a wolf scat on top of a grizzly bear scat. Hardly hidden, it was almost a brazen display of defiance since it had all been deposited right in the middle of a well-marked animal-trail certain to be detected by everything taking that path.

It was clear that these "deposits" were there for more complex reasons than mere waste-disposal. Tracing how animal waste is recycled in balanced ecosystems is arduous research.

When it comes to spotting whales, the first signs of their presence at the surface are most often slicks of the voluminous "poop" they deposit close to the surface. In fact, it's thought that whales can't excrete this waste when at that depth, due to the water-pressure, so release it when they come back up to the surface to take a breath and head out on another dive.

So their scat is not only a useful indicator of their local presence, it's become a rich source of data about their diet, life-stage, health, and even reproductive status. For example, when whale scat is red the whales have been eating krill while brown deposits mean they've been eating fish. In the absence of any other readily available data about them this can be the sole and even critical source of information for cetacean researchers..

Here’s how whale-scat makes the entire world a better place;

- - Whales feed on nutrient-rich marine life - Whales come to the ocean’s surface to poop - Whale poop fertilizes phytoplankton - Phytoplankton nourish the whole ocean food chain - Phytoplankton consume carbon and release oxygen

While the ocean environment covers nearly three-quarters of the Earth, you might think its sheer surface area to study would make investigating nutrient recycling in the ocean much more difficult on land. But, as with most "obvious" things in Science, that's not the case.

Oceans tend toward wide expanses of low nutrient perfusion with spotty but super-rich areas of highly concentrated biota. That's not true on land. Terrestrial environments, with their rich spectrum of substrates, are more highly, hence intricately connected.

On the forest floor, the re-utilization of organic-bound nutrients from plant litter is the order of the day. But, in sloping, well-drained landscapes that characterize large parts of the global land surface, the forest floor experiences permanent loss of organic-derived nutrients by plant litter erosion and leaching.

To replace this loss, atmospheric deposition has been invoked. This source is particularly pertinent for tropical, non-eroding ecosystems. Thus, a pathway represented by the slow release of “new” mineral nutrients from the mineral soil and bedrock by chemical weathering has been suggested as a further nutrient acquisition strategy to counterbalance loss from the “leaky” forest floor.

Clearly, nature is a miser. And we see that conservative aspect of the natural world everywhere we look. The very notion of "conservation" is an ideal for our natural systems to try and follow, like a human recycling campaign or "do not litter" effort. In the complex adaptive system we call "life", we continually witness evidence that the laws of physics set and enforce all the "speed-limits" on life's development, maintenance, and spread.

Circling back to your next field-trip, don't be surprised if your Guide stops to pick up a rock, only to reveal it's actually decaying poop from one local critter or another. Nor should you expect them to leave it at that since they'll likely pass it around, point out the work of insects, worms, fungi, and even bacteria working in stages to break it down.What's most likely is hearing;

- "look, whale poop…" just before you all spot the group of feeding humpback whales bubble-betting the plankton or the huge tail-flukes of a sounding blue-whale, who always poop right before they dive…
- "see all those rodent bones in these owl pellets" when walking by a tall tree at the edge of an open field, a preferred habitat for owls who listen for the rustling through the grass with their incredible ears and swoop silently out of their roosting spot to make their kill…
- "this bear is an active omnivore…" after pointing out the clear remnants of grass, roots, berries, termites, deer bone, and elk fur in fresh pile of grizzly scat…
- "here's an example of how wolves are omnivores, too…", when spotting the sparse remnants of vegetable matter in wolf-scat. While it's most likely to have come from the gut of an elk or dear, both strict herbivores…by consuming even some of the partially digested remnants of their prey's stomach contents wolves display a shred of omnivorousness in their lifestyle, too…"

For the record, the reaction from any group will almost always start with "Ewwwwww…gross!"

But that wears off quickly. I can relate to that reaction since, when teaching marine Mammalogy at Pier39's K-dock, if I couldn't smell the California Sea Lions from the parking garage some 200 yards to the South, and often upwind, I knew the day was going to be less exciting since, with sea-lions…

the more the merrier. As is usually the case in wildlife viewing.

That doesn't mean it's always pleasant. Island rookeries all over the world teem with sea-birds and pinnipeds. Where you find one species gathering, birthing, and mating there, you likely find many of the others. And it gets real stinky, real fast.

There was a time when such islands were mined for guano, bird poop, as a source for commercially applied fertilizers. Peru was once the world’s largest producer of guano; more than 21,000 tons were harvested annually from the Chinchas, 22 small islands off Peru's coast. Until chemists caught up with their own manufacturing processes, and Peru's economy crashed as a result.

The islands were first discovered by the Incas, who recognized guano’s benefits for agriculture. Throughout the 1800s the brown gold was in global demand for fertilizer and explosives; later that century, the resource became so valuable that two wars broke out over possession of the islands, with Spain, Bolivia, and Chile vying for them.

When you study wildlife, studying their excrement is part of the deal. Few on any citizen-science field-trip will go on to become professional biologists. And even if they do, they might still feel squeamish about picking up and studying another animal's poop. But there's hope for the squeamish, even in biology, since not all Biologists handle poop every day.

The one sure lesson in all of this?

As the saying goes "everything poops". And that, alone, is eloquent testament to how completely connected everything on this planet is!

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Bagged And Tagged!

CSL tagged branded 5477; ⒸRaceRocks California's Channel Islands map; ⒸGoogleMaps_CC BY-SA 3.0 Satellite-tagged California Sea-lion; ⒸNASA Lavender and Anna satellite tag; ⒸPacific Marine Mammal Center Channel Islands CA;_ⒸNASA Tagged Adult Northern Female Elephant Seal and pup; ⒸESRG UC-SC Northern Elephant Seal pups with hat tags; ⒸThe Marine Mammal Center Sausalito CA Hawaiin Monk Seal with satellite tag; ⒸTMMC, Sausalito, CA Blonde CSL; ⒸPeople Magazine.com Previous Next "Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior,"

Logan Pearsall Smithwas an American-born British essayist and critic. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th Century divines. "We are too quick to put labels on things. It is my profession. I get up and paint. Everyone wants to put a label on it, but I am a free spirit, so I fight against that."

Geoffrey Holderwas a Trinidadian-American actor, dancer, musician, and artist.[2][3] He was a principal dancer for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet before his film career began in 1957 with an appearance in Carib Gold "If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer."

Joan Baez is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist.[4] Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice.[ "All labels are offensive in some way. "

Joseph Donald Mascis Jr. better known as J Mascis, is an American musician who is the singer, guitarist and main songwriter for the alternative rock band Dinosaur Jr. "Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins."

Chirlane McCrayis an American writer, editor, and activist. She is married to former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and had been described as de Blasio's "closest advisor "You try to be yourself, do only what you've always done and like to do, and right away, you're tagged as an oddball."

James Deanwas an American actor. He is remembered as a cultural icon of teenage disillusionment and social estrangement, as expressed in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) "Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname."

Alan Aldaborn Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo; January 28, 1936) is an American actor, filmmaker and comedian. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he played Hawkeye Pierce in the war television series MAS*H (1972–1983). "The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for."

Salman Rushdieis an Indian-born British-American novelist and essayist.[ "We went out and tagged 17 sharks and watched where they went. The data was amazing."

Ashlan Gorse Cousteauis an American entertainment journalist. She is known for her work with E! News, Discovery Channel, and Travel Channel.[2] She married Philippe Cousteau Jr. in September 2013 "They were of many types of seals, all bearing the insignia of the King."

Howard Carterwas a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun in November 1922 "People see me and they squeal like tropical birds or seals stranded on the beach."

Carrie Fisherwas an American actress and writer.[3] She played Princess Leia in the Star Wars films, and received four Saturn Award nominations for the role. "The biggest predator of fish like cod is other fish - and seals keep fish like that in check."

Paul Watsonis a Canadian-American conservation and environmental activist, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an anti-poaching and direct action group focused on marine conservation activism. "I love taking the boat to the Farne Islands, a few miles offshore. It has a National Trust bird sanctuary with seals and every sort of seabird you can imagine."

Kevin Whatelyis an English actor. He is best known for his roles as Neville "Nev" Hope in the British comedy drama Auf Wiedersehen Previous Next

Bagged And Tagged

Have you ever heard the expression "Their reputation precedes them"?

It's a common euphemism Uncommon, however, when applied to seals and sea lions. Maybe even unprecedented.

If you want to study any wild-critter that's free to roam the earth, oceans, and sky as it pleases, try doing it without tagging them. While they might recognize one another on sight, we can't tell one from another without some visual cues so we can tell them apart.

That's because, as Lord Kelvin taught us;

"It's not until we begin to count and measure that we are doing the work of Science."

But we can't accurately "count and measure" without being able to distinguish one from another. No amount of data-collection is going to be representative of "the population", a critical maxim of statistical analysis, if it turns out that we counted and measured the same individual 1,000 times without knowing it.

So one day, when I spotted an adult male California Sea Lion hauled out with distinctively odd-for-an-adult-male blonde fu, It was sporting a prominent number, preceded with a capital "C", branded onto its left shoulder. Those two tidbits of information told me it had been branded shortly after it was born on San Miguel Island.

That's in the Channel Islands about 20 miles west of the Southern California coast. It's a major rookery for California Sea Lions, along with the Northern Elephant Seal and a few Steller Sea Lions.However, one of eight islands in the archipelago, San Miguel, is "the hot-spot" for the birthing and mating rituals of California Sea Lions. More of these marine mammals are born there than anywhere else in either North or South America. And June 15 has been determined to be the most common birthday for these sea-lions. We know all that because they've been counted and measured there for decades!

I dutifully recorded the data on our count sheet at Pier39's K-dock in San Francisco Bay so we could contact the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). They are the researchers using that type of branded-identification. Curious about its age and birthplace, their answer came back fairly quickly."He's a non-breeding male we nicknamed Hugo".

I was immediately suspicious about how they could know such an intimate detail about a wild-animal. One who was as likely to spend as much of its time in Glacier Bay Alaska as The Gulf of California.

Asking how they had determined that he was "non-breeding", they told me that he's easy to spot from even a long way off since he's so big and blonde, a color usually seen on adult females, all of whom top out at 400 pounds or so.

Hugo was closer to 700 pounds by then, but a far cry from the 800-pound-plus Bulls who dominate the annual-mating there, and had been seen rebuffing him with vigor for years. Since Hugo was known to be 12 years old, getting to be a senior citizen in sea lion years and surmised to have stopped growing by that time, they'd predicted he would never manage to pass on his genes to the next generation.

Their experience convinced them that he'd die that way, having been spotted year-after-year getting thrashed by the larger bull-males defending their 200 square feet of beach in hopes of mating with all the females that chose to give birth to their pups in his territory.

Wow! As I like to say when given a good, succinct answer; "That would just explain it!"

When I asked who named him they told me one of their senior cohorts, whose wife was an Art History Professor at UCLA. It turns out that was the name of a great artist on him, who in 1472 ACE painted a very famous human-being facing that very same fate.

Field Biologists! They never cease to amaze me with their uniquely peculiar range of behavior.

They were clearly amused, with more than a whiff of male-chauvinist delight over the poor critter's fate; continuing its celibate life only to die a sexually-frustrated virgin. Yet, despite snickering like frat-boys at his "unmanly plight", they'd awarded him some due-respect, as well.

You see, Hugo van der Goes was the famous Flemish artist who served as this Steller Sea-lion's namesake, painted "The Death of The Virgin"… meaning Mary, as portrayed in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

As human-beings we tend to consider labels, tags, and nicknames to be demeaning, an abbreviated insult to what we see as our complex uniqueness. But we give one another names at birth, get Social-Security Numbers assigned to keep track of us all. And who among us hasn't had many unwanted labels and tags applied to them across the course of our lifetimes?

In the popular video-game #GrandTheftAuto, also known as #GTA to the hard-core gamers of the world, when you lose your last life in the inevitable police-car chase after a wretched but exciting lifetime as a car-thief you're alerted by a final, farewell message; #BaggedAndTagged.

Bagged, as in a body bag, and tagged by the toe-tag that will identify you in the morgue. Although that's exactly backwards since they tag you before they bag you!

It makes me wonder, do all those seals and sea-lions resent getting tagged as much as we do? I suspect so, perhaps a lot more. After all, our labels usually don't require us to be tranquilized, poked-prodded-and-measured six ways from Sunday, then branded for life with a tool dipped in freezing-cold liquid-nitrogen!

Now there's one more good lesson in wildlife observation. When you're out there viewing wildlife, don't forget to look for tags. Note the type and color, the location on its body, and any alphanumeric notation used, These details point us to the people who know all about its birth, its lineage, some details about its life to date, and maybe even some prognostications regarding their future. Like poor Hugo.

Not quite like "Hugo", but we still came into this life with our "tag" already chosen for us by our parents. And live our entire lives knowing that there's a "bag" out there…somewhere…waiting for us all.

Welcome to Lord Kelvin's world, where getting "bagged and tagged" is our inevitable fate!

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Kid Scientist III - My First Words

Anthony Perkins as a Baby with Mother; ⒸModern Screen, March 1957 issue Father feeding the baby; ⒸNationaal Archief, PD Mother sea otter with rare twin pups; ⒸPD Tillman Mali - Mother with baby; ⒸFerdinand Reus from Arnhem, Holland (CC BY-SA 2.0) Moody Beach, Wells, United States (Unsplash) by David Straight; Ⓒdavidstraight_ CC0 1.0) Arizona 1960, Baby in Papoose; Ⓒ(CC BY-SA 4.0) The crimson fairy book; ⒸLang, Andrew, 1844-1912 Ford, H. J. (Henry Justice) at Flickr by Internet Archive Book Images Comparing Neural Nets, Baby & Tesla_Autopilot; ⒸSteve Jurvetson from Los Altos, USA (CC BY 2.0) KANYE WEST w/BABY HEADPHONES; ⒸLoRes_Alison Jackson Baby hand; Ⓒ(CC BY-SA 4.0) Plain home talk about the human system,(1896)_ⒸFlickreview Casiotone with baby and dad, (2004-05-19_16.50.52 by Mads Bødker); ⒸMads Bødker from Copenhagen, Denmark (CC BY 2.0) Baby and Mother in Momostenango; ⒸDavid Dennis (CC BY-SA 2.0) Previous Next "People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude."

John C. Maxwellis an American author, speaker, and pastor who has written many books, primarily focusing on leadership. Titles include The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. "We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far."

Swami Vivekanandawas an Indian Hindu monk, philosopher and author. He was a chief disciple of the 19th-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna.[4][5] Influenced by Western esotericism,[6][7][8] he was a key figure in the introduction of the Indian darsanas (teachings, practices) of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world. "Where words fail, music speaks."

Hans Christian Andersenwas a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his literary fairy tales. "For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone."

Audrey Hepburnwas a British[a] actress and humanitarian. Recognised as both a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema and was inducted into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame "The language of friendship is not words but meanings."

Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher.[3] A leading transcendentalist,[4] he is best known for his book Walden. "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for."

Georgia O'Keefewas an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes.; she has been called the "Mother of American modernism" "Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.:"

Edgar Allan Poewas an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. "He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words."

Elbert Hubbardwas an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company. "Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace."

The Buddhaalso Siddhārtha Gautama., was an ascetic and spiritual teacher of South Asia who lived during the latter half of the first millennium BCE.[4][5][6][note 8] He was the founder of Buddhism and is revered by Buddhists as a fully enlightened being[ "I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music."

Joan Mirowas a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975 "One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter."

James Earl Jonesis an American actor. He has been described as "one of America's most distinguished and versatile" actors for his performances in film, television, and theater,[1] and "one of the greatest actors in American history" "Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself."

Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced, and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature" Previous Next

Kid Scientist III - My First Words

I can't recall a single moment of the first two years of my life, and suspect that the nature of our human nature guarantees such a cognitive gap.

It’s thought that the neurological manner in which our memories were “written” in the earliest days of our learning experience changes over time. It appears that the recording process differs radically from how we do it in those more “conscious” states attained as we age.

My first clear memory is a bit disgusting, perhaps the reason it's stuck with me all this time. Under 3-years old at the time by all reports, during a neighborhood game of hide-and-seek I chose an empty but nonetheless stinky garbage can for my hiding place. For the win, I might add.

I can still see the maggots wiggling at the bottom, but it's the smell that I recall the most. Not its specific stinky character, mind you, just an overwhelming feeling of "stink". I understand it as that even now without being able to recall its specific pungency…until I experience a nearby skunk, garbage-dump, or dead whale.

Sadly horrific, a dead whale is hands down the stinkiest thing I've ever encountered. Even the White Sharks stop eating it after a week or so, fated to sink to the bottom and become a "whale fall". That's an instant ecosystem that lasts for years as all the organisms that live on the bottom of the ocean slowly recycle its massive corpus in a series of biological processes that span several stages and many years.

I also remember finding a penny while crawling around on my grandparents' kitchen floor, about the same timeframe. My Grandpa told me "finders keepers, losers weepers". That was his explanation, and what I recall most about the moment. The irony is part of my clearest memory of it. Because what I most vividly recall hearing is "Yes, you can keep it", the only real concern I had once I'd found it!

That I remember those early events speaks to my own cognitive development, by then perhaps a full year into talking. A non-stop activity for me, as my parents like to tel it. So I was already in a stage well past "My first words".

i don't recall my first words, although I know my Mom told me once when I asked. How I've forgotten that tidbit of my own natural history is perplexing. How could I forget that…it's about me after all?

The memories are likely still there, I've just lost touch with their primal sensory state to be able to recall them as they were formed in my brain.

But I do so dearly wish, as many must share with me, that I still had the ability to learn today as well as I did when I was a baby.

My presentations about science often start by challenging the group with "Who Taught You To Speak?" as a brain-teaser, a kuang-an as the original Buddhist philosophers called them. Designed as a background thought for the duration of the basic presentation, no one ever lets it percolate. Because they start shouting out answers right away.

"My parents", "my sister", "my grandparents"…

They keep coming until someone finally yells out "I did". That's when everyone turns and looks at them like they just sprouted horns…only to realize, as a group, it's the correct answer after all. Interestingly, it usually comes from the youngest one in the crowd!

The fact is that no one taught you to speak.

You were imbued, perhaps at your very conception, with the natural tools to learn about your world all on your own. And that's the very nature of a heuristic, a process or utility that enables us to learn via our-own direct experiences.

You watched and listened, heard and felt, smelled and tasted your world in such a way as to assign meaning to the things that comprised your everyday world. I refer to that utility as our "Inner-Scientist", on-duty from before we were born according to research into fetal-EEG's.

Then all of a sudden, to the utter amazement of your parents, family, and their friends you said "Mama", "Dada", "dog-dog", "kitty", perhaps even "Sponge-Bob" for you young folks.

No one taught you. You taught yourself in an exercise of "Hebbian Learning" the likes of which you would never fully experience again.

Here's how Donald Hebb put it in his 1949 book, "The Organization of Behavior";

"Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. ... When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased."

So, according to this theory of becoming human, thought to be a 23-year process since our brains take that long to fully develop, our own "inner-scientist" has been busy since birth, perhaps even before then.

Literally working "day and night", automatically deciphering aspects of what you’ve observed in your world. You not only imparted "sense" to much of it, but labeled it, and then interacted with it in a very different way than you have with information you’ve managed to pick up from either books or those around you.

Ah, those were the good old days, eh? You were free to learn and did so with impunity, seamlessly and transparently investigating, then learning, all on your own from the world around you.

Hardly to our detriment, but definitely putting a damper on our former free-thinking observe-and-learn gambit, once we uttered that single "first word" we were inducted into "the machine". That day marked the first day of your formal instruction, ironically coming just after proving to the world how well your ability to learn had fared without them.

So, after uttering just one word, it was "Welcome to humanity, kiddo." Have we got a surprise for you and your next 18 years!"

Your "inner-scientist" is still inside you, although sadly, perhaps even naturally less active and dedicated to understanding your world. But it is still there, quietly at work all the time on your behalf. That "inner-scientist" has the honor of being "that little voice" we are all so familiar with but have never actually met.

Perhaps the time has come for you get up the nerve to re-introduce yourself after all these years. So, what are you waiting for? It's been politely but quietly asking you to do so since you were dragged away by a more conscious, yet less focused, approach to understanding your world.

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Kid Scientist II - My First Islands

Port Byron, Illinois Hardiness Zones 2; ⒸPlantmaps Tower Rock; ⒸSleepysavage PD-US Port Byron, Illinois; Hardiness Zones; ⒸPlantmaps Mississippi River Side Channels; Ⓒformulanone (CC BY-SA 2.0) Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Fish Refuge Panorama; ⒸRoyalbroil & USFWS (CC BY-SA 3.0) Provisional Head of Navigation of Wolf River; ⒸGary Bridgman 1998, Oxford Town, Wolf River Conservancy (CC BY 2.0) Madrid Bar from New Madrid, Missouri; ⒸNyttend PD-US LockAndDam15, rock Island Illinois; Ⓒ Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS NPS PD-US Islands in Mississippi River Dubuque Iowa; ⒸPreston Keres, USDA, PD-USGOV Island in the Mississippi River, Marshall Bay, Ontario; ⒸEdwin Lester Brittain Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Dead Zone redemption; ⒸRobert J. Hurt Previous Next "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."

Ralph W. Sockmanwas the senior pastor of Christ Church (United Methodist) in New York City, United States. He gained considerable prominence in the U.S. as the featured speaker on the weekly NBC radio program, National Radio Pulpit, which aired from 1928 to 1962, and as a writer of several best-selling books on the Christian life. Faith is an island in the setting sun, But proof is the bottom line for everyone."

Pail Simonis an American musician, singer, songwriter and actor whose career has spanned six decades. He is one of the most acclaimed songwriters in popular music. "In the islands of the Aegean Sea, every island is full of graves."

James Theodore Bentwas an English explorer, archaeologist, and author "You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that."

Patrick McGoohanwas an Irish-American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer of film and television. "England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea."

Salman Rushdieis an Indian-born British-American novelist and essayist.[2] His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent. "We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

H. P. Lovecraftwas an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos "The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind."

John Millington Syngewas an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. "The conductor's stand is not a continent of power, but rather an island of solitude."

Riccardo Muti is an Italian conductor. He currently holds two music directorships, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini. "The rain, which had continued yesterday and last night, ceased this morning. We then proceeded, and after passing two small islands about ten miles further, stopped for the night at Piper's landing, opposite another island."

Meriwether Lewiswas an American explorer, soldier, politician, and public administrator, best known for his role as the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, with William Clark Previous Next

Kid Scientist II - My First Islands

In the late 1960's my river-rat father, who was born on the banks of the Mississippi River in Andalusia, Illinois, decided he wanted his three sons to live that legacy, too. So we purchased some riverfront property in Cordova, Illinois.

Complete with its own "beach", we were perched on the Illinois-side banks of the Mississippi River. A slough of islands lay between us and the Iowa shoreline, a vast floodplain of wetlands with a maze of inlets and small islands peppering it with mystery and portent perfectly suited for a 'tween adventurer like me.

I think Dad’s US Naval background figured into this move since we bought our parcel of land not long after taking several trips on his former Marine Corps cousin's houseboat “Liebchen”. He had taught us to row a few years earlier in the Wisconsin Dells, and motoring was apparently his idea of seamanship's next logical step.

Then along came a 16’ aluminum Crestliner with a 50 hp Mercury, and my father took charge of the first of many “Captain’s Workshops” in my life. But it wasn’t until some family friends added their 12’ Sears & Roebuck johnboat, powered by a 25 hp Johnson outboard, to our flotilla that my true island adventures began.

Allowed to take it out alone for prescribed routes and strictly enforced periods of time, all those islands first became Robinson Crusoe’s lost world to me. I soon realized that I was actually following in the canoe wakes of Marquette, Joliet, and LaSalle.

Anyone thinking kids don’t listen in class is all wrong, for what had been mere textbook history for me up until then came alive when I thought of all the actual places my family had visited that carried the names of those three intrepid Mississippi River explorers.

I circumnavigated the chain first to get a picture of this area in my head, then scrounged up a chart from a nearby marina’s dark and moistly-murky boathouse. Armed with this fragile but useful new exploration tool, I went looking for places my shallow draft would allow me entry.

I can’t regale you with all my “voyages” into the jungly and mosquito-ridden forests of oak, elm, birch, pine. Not to mention every member of the poison ivy family known to man. I can say, however, that's when I first began to feel the tug of the sea.

I witnessed the flights, hunting forays, and even nests of what I had always thought lived exclusively as seabirds clearly living amid this "...Mississippi darkness rollin' down to the sea..."

Later on in life I became a biologist, working and teaching in both marine and fresh-water environments. This early experience in observing ostensible seabirds alive and well in my fresh-water world opened my eyes to science and took my imagination to ever increasing heights of wonder and awe for the natural world.

This river, this "Father of Waters” (along with all "his" island sons and daughters), touched my life in a very deep and meaningful way. I’m still an explorer, a seeker of things unknown to me, and am forever grateful to this natural wonderland of my youth for that.

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Kid Scientist I - My First Surf

Petoskey MI rockwall; ⒸJosh Noel : Chicago Tribune

Lake Michigan bathymetry map; ⒸNGC-Globe_CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Lakes cy.svg; ⒸLlywelyn2000_USACE_US-GOV

Surfing among the blockhauss in Capbreton; ⒸTangopaso_US_PD

Father and son spending time on the beach; ⒸHumeraali

"I love the smell of rain, and I love the sound of the ocean waves."

Amy Purdyis an American actress, model, para-snowboarder, motivational speaker, clothing designer and author

"Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end."

William ShakespeareEnglish playwright

"Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless."

Chief Seattlewas a Suquamish and Duwamish chief.[2] A leading figure among his people, he pursued a path of accommodation to white settlers, forming a personal relationship with "Doc" Maynard. The city of Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington, was named after him.

"I was happiest between the waves."

Gertrude Ederlewas an American competition swimmer, Olympic champion, and world record-holder in five events. On August 6, 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

"We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea."

Paul Tillichwas a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.

"Every day of the year where the water is 76, day and night, and the waves roll high, I take my sled, without runners, and coast down the face of the big waves that roll in at Waikiki."

Duke Kahanamoku was a competition swimmer who popularized the sport of surfing. A Native Hawaiian, he was born to a minor noble family less than three years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom

"My tears will keep no channel, know no laws to guide their streams, but like the waves, their cause, run with disturbance till they swallow me as a description of his misery."

John Clevelandwas an English poet who supported the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. He was best known for political satire.

"Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup."

Sara Teasdalewas an American lyric poet

" The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea."

Nikola Teslawas a Serbian-American[5][6][7] inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

"The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators."

Edward Gibbonwas an English historian, writer, and member of parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is known for the quality and irony of its prose.

Kid Scientist I - My First Surf

In the summer of 1965 when I was just nine years old we rented a beach house in Petoskey, Michigan with another family, longtime friends. As I recall, we pulled up in our brand-new 1964 Ford Falcon Station Wagon well after dark. In mid-summer, it was near or past bedtime for the families' 7 kids so were all hustled off to whatever beds we could find without even packing.

“Sleep in your underwear. It won’t kill you for one night!”

Our parents having spoken, off to bed we went. I dreamed about the cold waters of Lake Michigan I was going to swim in the next day, and exploring the vast sandy beach we had all marveled at in the brochures we’d poured over for months in anticipation of our summer vacation.

At some point in the night I was awakened by a sound I had never heard before. I couldn’t figure it out, and Svengali-like it drew me out of the bed. Down the dark and unfamiliar stairs and through the back door I found a set of long concrete steps leading to the lake.

On my way down the steep stairs toward the source of this mysterious sound the moonlight revealed that what I had heard was Lake Michigan’s waves coming ashore on the sandy beach below.

Growing up on the Mississippi River I was no stranger to the many sounds of running water, and even on that river's riparian beaches had heard waves lapping ashore. But never before had I heard and felt surf crashing on sand.

That particular sound and feel underfoot are reserved for larger bodies of water than rivers. Standing their in my fruit-of-the-looms I was simply frozen by discovery. A moment later I heard a familiar sound, turned and saw my Father following me down the stairs. Parents, as we all know, are blessed with super-powers, acute hearing tuned to the frequency of children at work this time.

We sat together on a midway landing's stone wall and listened to the waves until the chilly night-air drove us both back to our warm beds. All I could say was “It’s waves. It’s the waves coming in.”

It occurs to me now, through the mist of long ago memories, that I must have sounded much like Forrest Gump; “Lieutenant Da, you’ve got legs. Magic legs!”

I recall my Father's wry smile, now recognizing in that formative memory the way teachers feel when witnessing their charges learn the ways of their shared world.

To this day those living memories buried within the magical and mystical sounds of water have kept me on it, under it, or near it whenever I can manage to do so!

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Are There Sharks In These Waters?

The cookie cutter shark; ©Marc Dando cookie cutter-bite2; ⒸSharks : By ASEC cookie cutter bite on a tuna; ⒸSharks : By ASEC Female Northern Elephant Seal with CCS bite; Ⓒby Jerry Kirkhart in Smithsonian Magazine white shark-attacking a sealion; ⒸSharks by ASEC Orca preying o a sea lion; ⒸAv Bjarne Røsjø University of Oslo Bull Sharks In Mississippi River_1937_1995; ⒸFoxNews29 Steller Sea Lion eats juvenile Salmon Shark ; ⒸFred Ohearn Cookie Cutter shark ⒸEdith Widder Previous Next "Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges."

Peter Benchleywas an American author, screenwriter, and ocean activist. He is known for his bestselling novel Jaws and co-wrote its film adaptation with Carl Gottlieb. "Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives"

Roy L. Pickering Jr.is an America author of the novel Patches of Grey, the novella Feeding the Squirrels, and the novel Matters of Convenience. 2020 marked the debut of his first children's book, an illustrated middle grade chapter book entitled The Absolutely Amazing Adventures of Ava Appelsawse "'It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it."

Laureen Oliveris a US politician who co-founded the New York State Independence Party. "There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark."

Douglas Adamswas an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humourist, satirist and dramatist. Adams was author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy, "It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words, like 'What about lunch?'"

A. A. Milnewas an English author popular for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and children's poetry. "Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy."

Saadi Shīrāzīwas a major Persian poet and prose writer of the medieval period. He is recognized for the quality of his writings and for the depth of his social and moral thoughts. "French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody's afraid of French fries."

Robert Kiyosakiis an American businessman and author.[1] Kiyosaki is the founder of Rich Global LLC and the Rich Dad Company "In some areas I am more noted for reading then I am for cookies!"

Wallace "Wally" Amos, Jr.is an American TV personality, entrepreneur, and author from Tallahassee, Florida. He is the founder of the Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie, the Cookie Kahuna, and Aunt Della's Cookies gourmet cookie brands, and he was the host of the adult reading program, Learn to Read. Previous Next

Are There Sharks In These Waters?

The first time I heard this question asked out loud was from a kid who asked me in a heavy NY or NJ accent. I’m not mocking the way they speak when I retell the story as “Hey Mister, are there sharks In these waters?”. Really. I'm not

It's a memorable event for several good reasons. The first was his accent, I admit. It was because of the abrupt way it came to me, a disembodied accent from above and behind while I was busy lifeguarding at River Country Water Park, the first one in the world back in 1976, that sticks with me. I was stationed on an old-timey log bridge right below the white-water rapids, where the water was pounding at a rate of 4,000 gallons-per-minute. I had made several jumps already that summer to rescue struggling poor swimmers who fell off their inner-tube rafts during the last drop-off into the calmer, shallowing cove.

Another is that we were in the middle of Florida at the time on the shores of "Bay Lake", a fresh-water lake of course, centerpiece of the sprawling Walt Disney World attractions.

Fresh-water, meaning devoid of sharks.

As a Field Guide you can count on it. Teach anything anywhere near open water of any kind, river-lake-or-ocean, and someone is eventually going to ask you if there are sharks in there. But when you find yourself doing so in San Francisco California in front of 200-plus sea lions, who are essentially swimming sausages to the Pacific Ocean’s apex predators…

So, at Pier39 the answer is “Yes, there are.” Over 400 species at last count, with maybe 29 different kinds of sharks that can be sighted swimming just off the California coast.

Usually, its their unarticulated questions you end up answering because they’re never interested about any sharks other than the 5 or known man-eaters, as they have come to be known. But factor in the local marine seals and sea-lions, five species of pinniped in all; the Harbor Seal, Northern Elephant Seal, California Sea-Lion, Northern Fur Seal, and Guadalupe Fur Seal and it becomes a much better question.

Blubbery due to the cold water off the Central and Northern California coast, when I describe the pinnipeds as "the sausages of the sea" I'm not really exaggerating since at least 4 resident sharks and the transient Orcas all hunt and eat them with relish.

This vector of interpretation sadly glorifies cable TV’s big-bad #SharkWeek, which has sadly devolved into #SharkAttackWeek. But, to be fair, I’ve found the science in many of their hour-long features to be top-notch.

In fact, a recent episode debunked the recent "White Sharks Attacking Caged Divers" meme.

After studying the video evidence of these huge predators "attacking cage divers", shark-experts quickly ascertained that they weren't attacking those people. Rather, the already over-stimulated food-frenzied sharks had been unwittingly lured into the cages when the tour-guides dragged bloody-bait near the cages simply to enrich the already totally artificial experience.

That’s good science, but even then the word #Attack got used so many times I lost count. But don’t try to tell me that the youngest and most impressionable viewers will recall much more from the "educational television" than “attack” and “divers”. They won't.

As a scientist I am not interested in disproving yet another spectacle-induced meme that stems from nothing but human imagination seeded to a sad load of seemingly intentional misinformation. But as a Naturalist-On-Duty at a public place, however, you have take the questions as they come.

It's not fair to anyone to treat them like they've asked you that same question you've heard a million times. It's the first time for them. I answer with professional relish, but with the goal of dispelling the misinformation they bring with them before it even comes up as a question.

And you never know when you're going to be surprised by a question, declaration, or admission form the public. You gotta' stay on your toes, another good reason to react to every reaction with a weather-eye out for clues to their real question.

One day, a boy came up to me at Pier39's K-dock and carefully studied the three marine-mammal pelts I was displaying from our marine mammal hospital; (California Sea-Lion, Harbor Seal, and Sea Otter)

He carefully inspected each one, handled the sea-lion skull I had set out for the more tactile learners, looked through my binoculars and spotting-scope for a long time, thoroughly inhaled the picture book I had of our Marine-Mammal hospital’s past patients and their ultimate release.

Then, all of a sudden, he announced that his favorite shark was…wait for it…

the cookie-cutter shark.

Wow. I was delighted. In fact, I almost fell off the viewing stand. I said "Dude…that’s my favorite shark, too!" He smiled broadly and gave me a high-five. Then we spent another half-hour together discussing why that was his favorite shark.

His favorite is a truly unique, not well-known species. But he lacked some insight into the many aspects of its incredible evolutionary path that make it so successful within the open-ocean ecosystem .

And boy did this shark evolve. Or counter-evolve. He might have been an overly eager fifth-grader, but his capacity to understand the key tenets of natural selection mirrored in the cookie-cutter shark's biology reminded me that detailed simplicity is one of evolution's chief strengths in explaining "The Origin of Species".

You see, almost all fish are counter-shaded to some degree, event the most colorful tropical fish. Darkish on top (dorsal), compared to being much lighter on the bottom (ventral), this has come to be common in our lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, and oceans. It renders the critter difficult to see from above peering down into the darker depths of the water below, and difficult to see from below framed against the light of the sun penetrating from above.

In seriously predator-rich environments, as we see in all the liquid environments on Earth, this is a genetic trait whose contribution to survival is now thought to have been critical enough to eventually comprise all the modern fish. Except for a few.

The cookie-cutter shark is a great example. It’s thought that the counter-shading is still part of the its embryonic genetics, which makes its counter-illumination such a special adaptation.

A trait evolved over the millennia, and common to almost every species of fish, this shark exhibits bioluminescence from a network of tiny light-producing organs called photophores arrayed all along its underside.

So what, you might be saying? Here’s what; * + - the overall effect overcomes their long-evolved counter-shading that makes it highly visible at the surface at night. - adapting a darker collar around its neck breaks up the glow, which makes it resemble two smaller fish’s outlines when viewed from below. - its novel behavioral counter-practice, swimming at the surface at night, perhaps the most dangerous activity ocean-dwellers avoid at all costs.

These counter-intuitive adaptations, to us that is, define its unique predatory lifestyle. It is a shark, after all, despite its diminutive size. So, it mimics a prey animal swimming at the surface. And, with these special counter-adaptations, it appears to be the silhouette of a small fish when viewed from below.

The kicker is that this remarkable shark turns at the last moment when under attack from much larger predators, like the White, Mako, Blue, Tiger, Bull, and Hammerhead Sharks, Stingrays, Tuna, Wahoo, Barracuda, Swordfish, Marlin, Orcas, Dolphins, Porpoise, Sea-Lions, Elephant Seals,

Equipped with a bandsaw-like set of teeth, they drive them into the attacking animal using their own momentum to provide a bite-force the cookie-cutter shark lacks on its own.

With its specially-adapted and impressive teeth arrayed in a near-circular set of jaws, it attaches itself, using its equally unique suctorial-lips and specialized pharynx, to neatly excise a circular chunk of flesh from large predators seeking prey from below.

The cookie-cutter reference refers to the nearly perfect circle of flesh taken out of the hapless predator, who’s left without an expected dinner and sporting a nasty new wound that leaves a distinctive round scar commonly seen on many sharks, tuna, orcas, swordfish, and even submarines!

It moves from ostensible prey to successful predator in an instant.

Too small, weak, and slow to penetrate the hides of animals it preys upon on its own, this is a complex story of behavioral adaptation wed with deep anatomical specialization to adapt a way of life that's completely counter to its current cousins and ancient ancestors.

I give you The Cookie-Cutter Shark. It lives up to it's name in a very real way. Now that’s an evolution story.

My young friend knew some of this, but not the entire story. Nor had he been schooled quite enough in the complexities population generics to appreciate that aspect of his favorite shark. But he was after that.

And I think that lesson took. A month or so later I got a letter from both him and his parents thanking me, along with a crayon coloring sheet I’d given him of "The Marine Animals Of San Francisco Bay", now sporting a cookie-cutter shark he’d drawn free-hand for me.

I smiled because when we were together he asked it we'd be lucky enough to see one that day.

I felt bad since I had neglected to mention that these sharks don’t live in the bay, but are deep-water sharks who use the water-column to rise and fall like the plankton according to the day-night cycle. They spend their days in the deep dark water not typically found close to shore.

They only come to the surface to feed at night, where and when all these amazing adaptations work in concert for them

It’s thought that our local sea lions, whose scars we can clearly see when they are hauled out, get most of their cookie-cutter scars early in life before they figure out this prey-masquerading-as-predator’s strategy. It seems they are mostly susceptible to these non-fatal attacks when young and inexperienced, spending 9 months or so before leaving the warmer waters of their birth and nursing stage.

The females all revisit these deeper waters during their annual trek to mate on the same beaches of their birth in the Channel Islands. The deep water cantons meet the islands j20 miles or so offshore where mating takes place shortly after that season's pups are born.

Although difficult to measure or prove, some of them just might not be that bright, never learning to stop falling for the cookie-cutter shark's ruse, It's possible. Intelligence is an adaptation, too, isn't it?

That some might not be as smart as others is a dynamic every human-being has witnessed among its own species! I have a friend with a pet terrier that gets sprayed by a skunk every Spring. Whether Sophie-the-Terrier is pathologically stupid, or just likes the smell of skunk-juice are both viable possibilities I guess.

And that's what makes #Science so much fun. Conjecture is easy. Proving it is hard!

Oh well, I hope I inspired him to learn these details on his own. That was the ultimate goal, to be sure. The work he put into informing his own curious nature bodes well for him. He came to Pier39 prepared for his visit. I suspect he'll keep it up.

You never know what you are going to get as a Field Guide. The more complex details of science and natural history can be quite difficult to convey when the groups you are leading come with highly varied levels of familiarity with #MotherNature.

But, in his case, it was easy. Easy like Sunday morning, as the song goes.

Easy like talking with friends over a cold-beverage after a game of tennis. Easy like enjoying a nice dinner with a friend after they cooked your favorite meal.

That’s the way it goes in the field. Sometimes. Occasionally, someone comes along and just swims right into your Field-Guide's wheelhouse, so to speak.

And when that happens, you both win!

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The Worm-Man of Alcatraz

An Alcatraz Island Ferry; ⒸEscape From the Rock Boat Tour Alcatraz 2021; Ⓒ CC BY-SA 4.0 Red Wrigglers, Eisenia fetida; ⒸCC BY-SA 3.0 Bird's Eye view of San Francisco from Alcatraz Island. ⒸNational Park Service The SeaBirds of Alcatraz ⒸNational Park Service Alcatraz Island nesting sites. ⒸNational Park Service Dick Miner; ⒸDiana La Dick Miner with his "compost award ribbons"; ⒸTWMoA A rose-bed on Alcatraz Island. ⒸNational Park Service Appalachian Trail Sign; ANST Triangl Logo; ⒸCC_PD_US The Water-Birds of Alcatraz; ⒸNational Park Service Female blackbird with earthworm in the rain; ⒸCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Waste In Ecosystems; ⒸWildlife SOS:Karthikeyan Brandt';s Cormorant; ⒸNational Park Service Pelagic Cormorant; ⒸNational Park Service The Western Seagull; ⒸNational Park Service The Pigeon Guillemot; ⒸNational Park Service The Black Oyster-catcher; ⒸNational Park Service Black-crowned Night Heron; ⒸNational Park Service The California Seagull; ⒸNational Park Service Snowy Egret; ⒸNational Park Service Great Blue Heron; ⒸNational Park Service Previous Next "Planted by successive generations of inhabitants, from Civil War soldiers and civilian criminals to the families of officers and guards, [the island’s plants] provide clues to the aspirations and yearnings of those who once lived here.”

Delphine HirasunaAmerican author, for more than 25 years, Delphine also wrote a weekly feature column for the two largest Japanese American newspapers in the U.S. and co-authored a top-selling Japanese cookbook, Flavors of Japan. In 2002, she was named a laureate of the San Francisco Public Library. of Alcatra; "The ground's generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty! Try to be more like the ground."

RumiJalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī; more popularly known simply as Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th-century Persian poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. "Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay."

George Meredithan English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but he gradually established a reputation as a novelist "But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost."

Henry David Thoreauwas an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher.[3] A leading transcendentalist,[4] he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state "Tomorrow composts today."

Bruce Sterlingis an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre. "Old gardeners never die; they just very slowly turn into the most magnificent compost. But what a marvellous, active brew it is!"

Peter Cundallwas an English-born Australian horticulturalist, conservationist, author, broadcaster and television personality. He lived in Tasmania's Tamar Valley, and until 2008, at the age of 81, presented the ABC TV program Gardening Australia. "I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs."

Joseph Addisonwas an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. "Hark! o'er the dread abyss the sea-bird screams-- The rocks resound--again the lightning gleams!"

John Ramsayborn in Kilmarnock Scotland in the year 1802, he was apprenticed, as a carpet weaver, a profession he continued even as he was writing his poetry, his most famous work "Woodnotes if a Wanderer". "Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order."

David Gerroldis an American science fiction screenwriter and novelist. He wrote the script for the original Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", created the Sleestak race on the TV series Land of the Lost. "It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms."

Friedrich Nietzschewas a German philosopher, cultural critic and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. "Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That's the fun of them. You're always learning."

Helen Mirrenis an English actor. The recipient of numerous accolades, she is the only performer to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting in both the United States and the United Kingdom. "The message is not so much that the worms will inherit the Earth, but that all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm."

Gary Larsonis an American cartoonist, environmentalist, and former musician. He is the creator of The Far Side, a single-panel cartoon series that was syndicated internationally to more than 1,900 newspapers for fifteen years. "Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it."

Samuel Beckettwas an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator who was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". "We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

H. P. Lovecraftwas an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos. "The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind."

John Millington Syngewas an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. Previous Next

The Worm-Man of Alcatraz; The Early Bird Depends On the Worm's Schedule

Alcatraz Island is a truly interesting place to visit. Plus, you can only get there by boat. Having been born in a place called "Rock Island" and subsequently living on a number of different islands before, I've become accustomed their isolated serenity.

Manhattan might well be one of the busiest places on Earth, but even while living there I picked up on some of that "island attitude", if not exactly like a Jimmy Buffet song.

It has a rich history spanning centuries of habitation by a range of different peoples, transcending a number of governments and different uses. Like;

- - as part of the homelands of the Ohlone, or “‘western people’” in the Miwok language, as well as the Coast Miwok. The island was used to isolate people who broke tribal law as well as a place to camp and gather food.
- - for the Spanish in 1769, who named it “Isla de Los Alcatraces” or “Island of the Pelicans” for its large pelican colony. Later the name was shortened to Alcatraz.
- - by the U.S. Army, who realized the strategic position of the island as a defensive site for the San Francisco Bay and began the work of building a fortress atop the sandstone outcropping in 1853.
- - Beginning on January 1, 1934 the Federal Bureau of Prisons began the process of selecting a warden and upgrading Alcatraz to an “escape-proof” maximum security prison.

From the very beginning, it seems that Alcatraz's purpose was inspired by its remote and grim nature.

Cold, foggy, wet, devoid of fresh-water and arable land. Yet, at the same time, it could be brilliantly sunny, pristine, natural, full of nesting and migrating bird-life, surrounded by the bounty of the sea yet hidden in the middle of the North America's finest natural harbor nestled amid tectonic mountain ranges that make it an even more scenic place to visit.

But the hidden beauty of the island to a Field Guide lies in the wide range of topics one can teach there.

World History, Russian History, Spanish-American History, US History, United States Military History, Seamanship, Ornithology, Marine Biology, Ichthyology, Oceanography, Hydrology, Geology, …

and now gardening, Yes, I said gardening.

It's a little known fact that Alcatraz Island, from its earliest uses as military then civilian prison, perhaps its most well-known phase, was the home of the families of the staff (mostly men) stationed there.

Dating back to the earliest days of America's colonization, San Francisco's first defenses comprised eleven cannons. While the soldiers, back then all men, were busy with their duties their families lived on the island with them.

The kids were ferried to San Francisco and back every weekday for school. But their wives soon discovered there was only so much housework and cooking they could do to fill their days.

Faced with this daunting reality, along with the typically grim atmosphere of a military fortress and situated in a well-known foul-weather district, the place was positively depressing as a home. So these determined homemakers started gardening.

They planted wild-flowers where they could, and raised flowers in pots and garden-beds they built closer to their homes to brighten the place up a bit. The practice faded in more modern times when Alcatraz became a Federal Prison and the families found housing in the surrounding communities instead of living there.

Until it came back!

"In 2003, the Garden Conservancy, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and National Park Service began a collaboration to restore the gardens. The team continued preservation planning efforts initiated by the NPS in the early 1990s."

So, not long after I started leading trips for tourists to nest seabird sites in the National Park Services' Alcatraz Water Bird Docent program, I met "The Worm Man of Alcatraz". While taking the ferry to the island one day for a day of "Water Bird Education", and crowded with throngs of tourists on-board with us, we found ourselves sitting together on the top fore-deck that the tourists seemed to avoid.

We must have recognized one another as locals, not tourists, so we struck up a conversation. He discovered that I was going to help people learn about the 7 species of water-birds who mate, nest, hatch, and grow up on Alcatraz Island every Spring-Summer-and-Fall, a program he already knew about.

But I learned a whole new chapter about Alcatraz Island from him. Because he was going to supervise his vermiculture project there, a big word that just means "raising worms". In his case, it was a conservation effort since the Island has precious little in the way of natural resources to use for the island-wide gardening effort he was helping get off the ground.

It turns out that to garden out there they have to ship in every bit of fresh-water, fertilizer, extra soil, and compost. By using worms he accelerated their capacity to take their own clippings, often wastefully discarded by some such efforts, and turned it all into natural compost they could use right there where it was produced.

The worms at work here are known as "red wrigglers". Or Eisenia fetida, which translates to "protein" first described by an American zoologist named Gustav A. Eisen.

They can turn almost any form of organic matter into natural compost in short order, a natural fertilizer that drastically reduces the amount of raw chemical run-off their gardening effort might put back into San Francisco Bay. Reducing the number of trips required to transport those materials all the way out there was yet another conversation plus.

Dick Miner, from Marin County, California, is a very accomplished and interesting man. He's been volunteering on the island since 2005 after a long career as a microbiologist living in San Anselmo California. On Alcatraz, where he can be found most Wednesdays and Fridays, he has earned the nickname “Chief Composting Officer.”

"When Dick Miner talks of earthworms, he nearly tears up. “These here are red wigglers,” he says softly, looking down at a cluster of squirming spaghetti strips the color of steak sauce he’s holding in his soil-covered hands. He even names worms he’s especially fond of, according to those who volunteer with the 69-year-old Miner on Alcatraz Island. Miner also raises the wigglers in the kitchen of his San Anselmo home. So, what’s with this love of all things annelid?

“Worms work wonders with compost,” Miner says, standing next to one of four closet-size compost bins on the northeast side of the 22-acre island. “They eat organic waste and turn it into some of the best fertilizer on Earth.”

from "Marin Magazine"; "The Worm Man of Alcatraz"

Interestingly, this was not my first run in with worms as composting experts. When I was working with PATH in North Carolina, "The Piedmont Appalachian Trail Hikers Association", we were responsible for maintaining 60 miles of the AT in Southwest Virginia.

The AT was built with the through-hiker in mind, each segment planned to be an "average" day's march. So each segment featured a camping shelter and outhouse facility for each night's stop.

Over the course of three seasons we replaced each of the then nearly 65 year old outhouses, digging new holes and outfitting them with vermiculture units that would transform the hikers' daily deposits, so to speak, into natural compost. We could then apply the compost generated to replant old trails we had to replace with newer, more well-designed trails for those hiking tracts worn away by decades of natural erosion.

It was a conservation triple-whammy.

Sweeter-smelling outhouses that would never need to relocated due to being "over-filled" that self-generated natural fertilizer that would not run-off into, hence pollute, the local aquifer.

The modern practice of recycling is not recent, our earliest to quite recent ancestors all used compost they accumulated from all the dead plants, animal waste, and organic refuse a farm generated to help them grow their crops, revitalize the nutrients in the very dirt they grow in, and reduce the need for costly and often toxic forms of industrially-produced fertilizers.

So, in this case, "the early bird" doesn't so much "get the worm" as it depends on that worm's rigorously maintained schedule for its breakfast.

In the natural world, "The Great Outdoors", waste is a rhetorical misnomer. Perhaps an unnecessary word altogether. Quoting from "Nature’s Efficient Recycling System Makes Sure Nothing Ever Goes ‘Waste’; February 24, 2022 by Neellohit Banerjee

"Nutrient cycle or ecological recycling is the perfect inspiration for human beings to learn and imbibe. If Nature can do it on such a large scale, human beings also have the ability to learn from Mother Nature and tackle the gargantuan waste conundrum that we face today."

Indeed. Nature is the perfect inspiration for human beings. It's as natural a solution as I've ever to every manner and kind of human-induced crisis. Let's hope that humanity can put this mantra into practice everywhere we live.

Because if we turn out to be late, instead of early, in gaining that wisdom, unlike the proverbial bird, whom we think evolved from those dinosaurs' ancestors…

we human-beings might well end up as the Earth's next "dinosaurs" ourselves!

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Not In 30 years Of Rangering...

YNP; ⒸCC_PD_US Gibbon wolf pack standing on snow;. ⒸDoug Smith;.March 2007 NPS photo by ⒸNeal Herbert Coyote (Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming); ⒸNPS (CC_PD_US) Wolf-Peepers; ⒸGrantSinclair; OurWanderFilledLife_dotcom North gate; Yellowstone National Park; Ⓒ(CC-BY-SA-4.0) Yellowstone National Park; 150 years old; ⒸNPS (CC_PD_USGov) Spotting Scopes; ⒸJSchneider at NationalParksTraveller Yellowstone Bison mother and recently born calf; ⒸTaryn_Happiest at Outdoors_dotcom Yellowstone Forever; ⒸTheYellowstoneAssociation Dog-to-Human Years calculation; ⒸTimothy Vogel Previous Next "Beautiful and rare Aurora, In the heavens thou art their Flora "

Christopher Pearse Cranchwas an American writer and artist; Though not one of its founding members, Cranch became associated with the Transcendental Club. "I have stitched life into me like a rare organ."

Sylvia Plathwas an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar "Full stories are as rare as honesty. "

Zadie Smithis an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer and has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010. "Time itself made all things rare."

Lionel Shriveris an American author and journalist who lives in the United Kingdom. Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. "Excellent things are rare. "

Platowas a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. "Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was."

Neal Stephensonis an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction exploring mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. "It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet."

Thomas Harrisis an American writer, best known for a series of suspense novels about his most famous character, Hannibal Lecter "Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals."

John Doewas an American writer, historian, and philosopher. He became best known for his work The Story of Civilization "Rare indulgence produces greater pleasure. "

Juvenalwas a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century AD. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the Satires "The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare."

John Doeis a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist Previous Next

Not In 30 Years of Rangering

Scale is a difficult notion to manage in this huge world of ours. Millions, billions, trillions…gigabytes, petabytes, terra-flops of data…

numbers of this massive scale quickly dwarf human imagination Even if we could all agree that there are billions of grains of sand on a local 10 foot by 100 foot beach, we'd have to weigh all sand to understand how much beach that actually represents. Because even trying to count every grain is an impossible task.

Who would even try such a thing since simply weighing it to understand how much beach we're talking about is so much easier? And cognitively accessible. We can all visualize ten pounds of sand, while a billion tiny grains of sand means nothing to us.

Dealing with the vastness of the natural world is something all of humanity deals with like a cognitive yo-yo. We move in and out of a variety of situations where we must not only imagine, but are required to make decisions based on our capacity to effectively factor scale into every choice we make.

We inherently understand, often without realizing it, the difference between the discrete and continuous. Some things we count, others we must measure simply because we can't count them in any meaningful fashion.

Take the term light-years; it's not a time-metric. It’s a unit of distance, how far light travels in a year. That's a dizzyingly huge number human-beings have come to accept as manageable by reducing the scale to a more accessible quantity.

A confounding example is a weekly, if not daily activity for most of us; weighing ourselves. While we can count the pounds we just gained or the inches we just added to our size in pants, both are possible only by rescaling measurements we take to convert them to a more a manageable scale.

Science only commences when we start to "count and measure", the start of a deductive chain of events we undertake to inform us of what's really going on. Here, the numbers say "you're getting bigger". Maybe it's time for a diet, eh?

While recapping our day, a former Chief Ranger of Yellowstone National Park leading our 5-day class in "Wildlife Tracking" told us that we had all witnessed something he’d never seen "in 30 years of Rangering".

When he chose to express it that way he knew that our shared grasp of the scale of "an entire career" would impress us about what a rare event it was.

In just 8 hours we had seen and observed all three canine species that inhabit Yellowstone National Park; the wolf, the coyote, and the fox. Many of them, in fact. And while not hanging out together, the expressed rarity of such a thing told us a lot about the fateful role of scale in our wildlife viewing success.

Most of us in that particular excursion had already retired at that point in our lives, our careers measuring a span of time most of us had already dealt with by commenting "I don't know where all that time went…it all seems like yesterday!" It was an astute way to interpret the rarity of their collective close proximity despite making their living in the same local habitats.

That's one way these closely related animals manage their overlapping choice of and competition for prey; avoiding one another. They live together in a shared ecosystem while trying to stay as far apart as they can from one another. Yet they still manage to fulfill their specific roles, what we call ecological niches, within that complex ecosystem.

A fellow student asked our guide “So, what are the odds of such a thing?”

He looked a bit puzzled, then answered ”Like I said, not once in 30 years!” As a statistician I can tell you…even I can’t answer that question. No one can.

Counting the number of times we've seen them together is easy. As an event standing out to him out as "only once in 30 years", that put a 1 in the numerator's slot of our would-be ratio.

The problem lies in having no readily available denominator to finish calculating that probability,

Compiling the number of times those three species were close enough to one another to actually register as an opportunity to be seen together would present an astronomically large number.

Plus, it would yield a probability that is indistinguishable from ZERO even if it was possible to ascertain in the first place. Which it's not.

It represents all 9,125 days, over 219,000 hours, of “never before” since wolves were reintroduced to the park. Coincidentally, that's when this Chief Ranger had first been assigned there. Across the vast expanse of the park, across all that time including nighttime when such observation is nearly impossible for a different reason, the times these three crossed paths presents an impossible task for field-biologists to count.

And without any representative numbers of those times, it's impossible to estimate with any accuracy as well. I refer to this incident as my "Canine Moment", riffing on a lesson we all learned earlier in life about "the human age of canines".

Multiplying a dog's age-in-years by 7 to help us imagine their age in "human scale" is old science. Actually, it's old-arithmetic, since all it did was expand a canine lifetime to the scale of the average human lifetime; 75 versus 12, the original estimates, is 7-to-1.

The new science studied chemical similarities in the DNA to arrive at its algorithm, not behavioral similarity or a mere extrapolation of average lifetimes.

"To figure out a dog’s 'biological age', they say, multiply the natural logarithm of the dog’s age in years by 16. Then add 31."

It might be far more accurate, built with far better data, but it's not nearly as easy to apply. Not many of us can do logarithms in our head. There's yet another harsh lesson in the vagaries of managing scale in our lives!

So, when even such re-scaled-numbers fail to impress us, analogies come to the rescue.

Imagine moving to a new city only to run into an old elementary-school classmate you didn’t even know lived there. Now factor in a third classmate bumping onto you both while you were busy reminiscing about your school-days together. Then, after a few more minutes of the three of you catching up with one another, your old kindergarten teacher walks by to crab at you for blocking the sidewalk.

Your mind might just explode. But it wouldn’t. We might marvel at it for a while, even use it as an anecdote regarding what we've learned about "rare" versus "never". But, with a nod to our cognitive adaptability, we accept such improbabilities as a matter of course.

Becoming accustomed to our lives touching in many unpredictable yet not wholly incomprehensible ways is apparently just one more aspect of our modern-humanity. The world we live in is so huge that “placing odds” on imaginable yet highly improbable events is apparently another "folly of human intelligence”.

These #NeverSeenBefore events can bring about an awesome feeling of insignificance, often combined with a keen sense of connection to a world still tauntingly full of unknowns.

They also emphasize how #HumilityBeforeTheMystery is a healthy way to live. Every mystery we manage to expose makes us a little less afraid of the myriad mysteries that continue to perplex us.I was thrilled to see all three representative canines alive, well, and participating in the vastly complex ecosystem we know as Yellowstone National Park. And while I readily admit that I love wildlife in all its forms, it was the improbability of the experience that made it such a valuable lesson for me.

As an unexpected testament to the sheer scale of the human experience, it's a valued memory and important life-lesson I have begun to understand can only be taught through our connection to and time spent "in the great outdoors"!

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Why Do They Do That?

Artis; California sea_ ion; ⒸCreative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Cormorants at John Pennekamp State Park; ⒸBillKeogh Humpback Whale breaching; Ⓒ Courtesy E. Lyman – HIHWNMS/ NOAA Permit # 14682 Monarch Butterfly migration; ⒸNational Geographic Starling murmuratio; ⒸCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Bear scratching its back against a tree. ⒸPD_USA_1977 Wolves howling; ⒸRICK MERIL AND WWW.COYOTES-WOLVES-COUGARS_dotcom Little brown bat hanging from the rafters; ⒸCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Previous Next "The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge."

Thomas Bergerwas an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man "Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff."

Steven Wrightis an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and film producer "It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it."

Robert Louis Stevensonwas a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses "Curiosity is the lust of the mind."

Thomas Hobbeswas an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. "Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas."

Paula Poundstoneis an American stand-up comedian, author, actor, interviewer, and commentator. "'The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. 'Who, what, where, why, when, and how!' They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old."

Dr. Sylvia Earleis an American marine biologist, oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer. She has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence since 1998. "'Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions."

Isaiah Berlinwas a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas “Ah, but my dear sir, the why must never be obvious. That is the whole point.”

Agatha Christie a quote taken from her book "Five Little Pigs", she was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. "Don't spend your precious time asking "Why isn't the world a better place?" It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is "How can I make it better?" To that there is an answer."

Leo Buscagliaalso known as "Dr. Love", was an American author, motivational speaker, and a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. Previous Next

Why Do They Do That?

When studying the natural world in order to understand it better, we get the best answers by asking the right questions. Which seems to make perfect sense, despite seeming like one of those push-me-pull-you dilemmas at first.

"How can I tell the right questions from the wrong ones?" is among the right questions. Asking "Why is that?" is the perfect goil.

Because it started with "How…", not "Why…", that's how!

Confused? Welcome to science. Were it not for such confusion there's be nothing left to figure out, right? And you're not alone. Forming the best questions is a skill that comes with time and concerted effort. Which entails experiencing a healthy ratio of failure-and-success in getting to answers that have any chance to pass scientific muster. As in; * + Does it improve the accuracy of the predictions our model makes? + Are they consistent with results from prior scientific inquiries? + Has the overall model become more reliable with that result?

Curiosity is hardly limited to working scientists. We all have an "Inner Scientist" at work for us all the time, diligently supporting every decision we make. And, like those professional researchers, everyone must improve their ability to interrogate the unknowns in their own lives. Like most good things in life, that skill rarely comes without working at it.

Let's try an example from a Field-trip I've led many times.

A common position California Sea Lions occasionally adopt while "hauled out", meaning not in the ocean, always draws the attention of the public. “Why do they do that?” came up every Saturday afternoon when I was teaching Marine Mammalogy at Pier-39's K-Dock in San Francisco.

While not every visitor asked it, the question never failed to come up in the ten years I was stationed there. It's a good question, and understandably so. Because a sea lion resting on land in this particular position looks a lot like a human-being falling asleep at their desk.

We've all seen it. Maybe during a post-lunch English class in high-school. Or late in the afternoon when an inconsiderate boss called a 5pm staff meeting.

Their head keeps drooping as sleep overcomes them. They "drop off", then wake up in start when their chin hits their chest. Only to doze off again a few moments later. The cycle can repeat itself for quite a while.

If they manage to make it to being "fully conked out", an expression of deep satisfaction and peacefulness seems to appear on their face. Then, they either get an elbow from a concerned classmate or colleague. Or end up falling out of their chair, waking up with a start and a shocked but embarrassed look on their face, much to the amusement of everyone there.

Resting sea-lions exhibit similar behavior. And when a suspicious sound, smell, or even an odd movement of the dock occurs, an instant change occurs. They quickly morph into self-preservation mode, seemingly aware of everything around them and clearly ready for acton. If it's perceived as dangerous, they all flee back into the water where they are far better equipped for self-defense than on land.

When a large group is startled out of their slumber it's called "flushing", because it sounds a lot like a flushed toilet as they all seem to hit the water at the same time

Some clever research has revealed that California Sea Lions, likely all the Otaarids (the eared seals, sometimes referred to as fur seals), can see behind themselves in this position. Which is a great thing to be able to do for an animal that has evolved great agility in the ocean but is a bit cumbersome, hence vulnerable on land.

And that's an uncomfortable situation for any critter. It seems that "personal safety" is one of those primal notions learned early in life. if not part of that mystifying cognitive-complex modern scientists try not to use; instinct.

But is that “why” they do it? We can’t say. Perhaps it just feels good, like some of us preferring to sleep on our sides instead of on our backs.

Ask a sea lion why it does that and even if it could speak “I don’t know” seems the likeliest response. Much like us, were we confronted with questions about why we furrow our brows when concentrating or blush after getting a compliment.

We hear this all the time in the field. Questions about the natural world that begin with "Why, …why, why, why, why, why?"

When confronted with too many “why’s” and not nearly enough “how’s, what’s, where’s, and when’s”, I try to move the crowd on to the other more productive, more cognitively challenging interrogatories. Substituting a “how” story, or one with a “where and when” ending is always more useful to everyone, for both the student and the teacher.

The truth is that not every question we deign to ask has an answer all ready to go simply because we want one. Or, worse, expect one. Nor does every behavior exhibited by an organism in a natural observation session come packaged with a neat explanation.

Frankly, "Why?" is a lousy interrogatory. It’s intellectually lazy, implying an expectation for the answer to our questions to be supplied for us rather than having to think up one for ourselves. Asking better questions than “why” when seeking to unravel nature’s many mysteries is the best way to go. For scientists.

Yet, that's true for everyone of us. "Why…" is the unmistakable sign of a curious mind, every teacher, parent and would-be field guide would be tilting at windmills without it.

But telling people who are legitimately curious about the natural world that their “Why?” question is shallow would quickly end that session. It's dismissive, exclusionary, and more than a bit arrogant. And, when phrased like that, comes off as hostile despite being true to the bone.

So, naturally, this notion comes with a caveat.

Don't tell students-of-nature not to ask questions that seek "why as an answer". Demonstrate how to ask better questions, instead. With a nod to "The Scientific Method", I like to lead with its built-in admonition about humility, emphasizing that the answer I'm giving has come to be accepted as the best answer we can muster. For now.

The beauty of this approach is that even in the absence of empirically derived answers accompanied by general scientific consensus, a student's questions can still be good ones.

So I often begin my response to questions in the field with "Well, our best current explanation is that…".

As in; * + Why do the cormorants all perch with their wings spread?

- - "…are drying out their wings since they spend so much time underwater fishing. If they don't, the oily secretions they apply by preening their wing-feathers afterwards to water-proof them won't stick. They'll eventually become water-logged, and unable to swim fast enough to catch fish."
- Why do whales breach?
- - …they are keeping in touch with one another when they are hunting in groups." - …this helps dislodge some of the more irritating parasites that attach themselves as hitchhikers on the whale's sensitive skin."
- Why do the sea-lions bark?
- - "…we don't know. There haven't been any definitive studies done to investigate this. maybe someone will soon. There's lots of work being done on the vocalizations of the cetaceans, whales, dolphins, and porpoise. Ad well as those of the songbirds. And the flagship research into animal communication has yielded a hefty semantic-lexicon among prairie dogs living near the Grand Canyon."

This will remind them that well-formed questions, when combined with some innovative experimental design and a bit of luck, will ultimately yield better answers. The kind that help us predict outcomes more accurately and reliably.

And don't forget to ask the group "Can you think of any good reasons yourself?" Thought provoking in its own right, questions they ask in their own words could lead to a good idea about an experimental-design that does eventually supply some credible answers to one of life's many mysteries.

And, with a subtle nod to the old adage "practice males perfect", they just might be teaching you how to ask much better questions yourself!

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Listen Up!

A typical camp dining hall. USDA Commodity Cheese My nephew "Listening Up!"during his first plane ride ever! Rous Sarcoma Virus Mystery Meat; nicknamed #ElephantScabs My nephew telling me how comfortable he is in my mummy-bag. Key Line Tarts Scientists eat while on duty all the time! USDA Commodity Rice The carcinogenic macrophage at work. USDA Commodity Beef (Hamburger) USDA Commodity Peanut Butter our "Grasshopper" With a staff that spends 6 hours a day in the water. lots of hot coffee on hand s always welcome! Previous Next "It is the province of knowledge to speak And it is the privilege of wisdom to listen."

Oliver Wendell Holmeswas an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932 "Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery."

Dr. Joyce Brotherswas an American psychologist, television personality, advice columnist, and writer. "A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something."

Wilson Miznerwas an American playwright, raconteur, and entrepreneur "Emma felt that she could not now show greater kindness than in listening.”"

Jane Austenwas an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. "Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him."

Simone Weilwas a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. "Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet."

Krista Tippettis an American journalist, author, and entrepreneur. She created and hosts the public radio program and podcast On Being. "If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening."

Marge Piercyis an American journalist, author, and entrepreneur. She created and hosts the public radio program and podcast On Being. "Listen to understand rather than listen to respond."

Barack Obamais an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He was the first African-American president of the United States. "If a cupcake doesn't' have frosting, it's just a muffin!"

Marywise 8-yo commenting on life. isten to her! "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein; was a German-born theoretical physicist,[7] widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. "Children must be taught how to think, not what to think."

Margaret Meadwas an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s "There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen."

Jalāludīn al-Rūmīwas a 13th-century Persian[poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. "Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens"

Jimi Hendrixwas an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Previous Next Listen Up

You never know where your next bit of wisdom will come from. That it came to me from a fortune cookie can't make a dent in its validity. Nor detract from its seminal utility for any life lived with purpose.

"Talk less. Listen more."

It turns out to be the best single piece of advice I've ever received about successfully interpreting the great outdoors for the public. As a budding young Biologist and Field-Guide, it was good counsel then. And still is, even for the aging "Gentleman Biologist" I am today.

An anchoring reminder of that presented itself not long after receiving that sage advice. And It came in the form of an observation made by a 12-year old boy, the son of a fellow field-guide, who was the Instructor and Founder of his own Marine Science Education platform taught aboard off-shore sailing junkets aboard a 41' ketch he built himself.

With a nod to a wildly popular television program at the time, "Kung Fu", in a place where assigning pithy nicknames was the order of the day, we dubbed him "Grasshopper". Living in Ft. Lauderdale while spending most of his free-time life at our Marine Station in the tropics, by this time he was already an accomplished fisherman, skin-diver, sailor, small-craft captain, and student of the biological sciences.

And hanging around with a bunch of young Marine Biologists, some of us little more than 10 years older than him, resulted in his possessing a unique and more advanced perspective on "the sciences" than most of his age-group.

An essay in "Smithsonian Magazine" had been making the rounds after one of our Biologists posted it on the bulletin-board of our Staff Lounge. "Guests and Hosts; You can dress a biologist up but you can't take them out to eat" was written by Dr. Milton Love, an Ichthyologist still hard at work at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

He related several of his more spirited mealtime conversations that had cleared the table of most of the non-scientist dinner-guests, much to his exasperated wife's chagrin. Although his examples were hilarious to us, we began to suspect that he secretly delighted in grossing-out his more faint-hearted fellow diners.

We were cut from similar cloth. But our own family-style meals were taken in a Dining Hall built to seat 100 people, most of whom had paid us for the opportunity to come live and study in such a beautiful place. Facing sessions that ran anywhere from three to eighteen days while sharing meals together 3-times a day, we had to be a bit more solicitous of the feelings of others than Dr. Love.

Because being able, if not delighted, to talk about death, suffering, and any number of indelicate topics while eating was a common trait most of us shared. It wasn't due to elitist cliquishness among the scientists as it was the collectively weak stomachs of the Staff's non-scientists that quickly limited our table to #BiologistsOnly status.

With that very spirit at work, some of us found ourselves sitting around after dinner discussing a leading theory about cancer in humans as possibly originating from viruses. Biologists had long known that various environmental factors played a role in a variety of human diseases. But new research was beginning to zero in on the genetic mechanisms at work in viruses that makes them a potent carcinogen in their own right.

"Scientists already knew that cancer could be caused by chemicals, radiation, and viruses, and that sometimes cancer seemed to run in families. But as the understanding of DNA and genes increased, they learned that it was the damage to DNA by chemicals and radiation, or the introduction of new DNA sequences by viruses that often led to the development of cancer. It became possible to pinpoint the exact site of the damage on a specific gene. (from "The History of Cancer"; The American Cancer Society)

In fact, Peyton Rous at the Rockefeller Institute in New York had long since described a type of cancerous tumor (sarcoma) in chickens caused by what later became known as the Rous sarcoma virus. Several viruses are now linked to cancer in humans, a long time coming in 1980 given that his original research began in 1911. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for that work in 1968, a mere decade before our post-dinner discussion took place.

I was a bit of a pup, myself, among that more senior crowd, having only recently matriculated with a Bachelors Degree in Genetics. My final year of biology classes was dominated by two of the hardest classes I've ever taken; back-to-back semesters of "Viruses I and II", each a 4-credit-hour course.

This allowed me to have a bit more to say on the topic than some of the others.

The discussion was taking place over our post-dinner coffee, along with one our Dining-Hall favorite; individual Key Lime Tarts. Our young "Grasshopper" was hanging on every word as he scarfed his dessert down with summer-camp "bug-juice" instead; aka "Kool-Aid". His attention was amazing, since it went on for about twenty minutes. As the vigorous discussion finally wound down, I made my final point.

A fresh perspective on disease, at that point not commonly applied to discussions of fatal human-diseases.

Cancer figured prominently in the emerging field of "Sociobiology" since was becoming more relevant to explaining the fledgling notion of "The Selfish Gene" as a possible explanation of the "evolution of ecosystems". Mostly considered "informed conjecture" by the early 1980's, it had already been demonstrated that cancer in wildlife was an important ecological and evolutionary force to consider.

Quoting from "Predation shapes the impact of cancer on population dynamics and the evolution of cancer resistance" by The National Institute of Health (NIH);

"…the feedback of altered biotic interactions on the evolution of resistance against cancer in the context of community ecology has not been investigated. From this new perspective, we theoretically investigate how cancer can challenge expected interaction outcomes in a predator–prey model system, and how, in return, these altered interaction outcomes could affect evolution of resistance mechanism against cancer."

In fact, the dynamics of the classic predator-prey relationship was now itself under some modern revision, our own understanding of the natural world having transcended the iconic "Wolves vs Moose" study begun in 1958 on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Commonly referred to as ISRO, we had all studied this model of ecological balance in college.

Our senior scientist was apparently speaking for us all with this closing observation;

"Everything alive feeds on energy not of their own making. The plants get it from the sun, some microbes from geo-thermal vents, perhaps even some form of life we don't even know about yet takes it directly from the heat generated by the Earth's very core. Life comes from life, and as far as we know today that requires the death of something. If you want to talk about the apex of all life, start looking for another job.

No amount of wanting life to conquer death is going to change the reality that neither life nor death ever wins…they fight to an endless draw in a seemingly infinite duel"

Near-starving Marine Scientists who spend 12 hours a day in the wind, water, and sunshine of the tropics are never shy about leaving an empty larder behind. Yet, with our coffee gone and the tarts all long-since gobbled down, there was nothing left to eat or drink…

and precious little left to say at that point.

So we just shared a last contemplative moment with each other, each of us anticipating the familiar three-chimes from the "Ship's Bell", our shared Pavlovian-master "who" rang us all into action 14-times a day. This time, alerting us all that we had 10-minutes to get to our assigned evening program stations.

Suddenly, our rare moment of silence was broken. But not by the bell. "Grasshopper" had finally chimed in with his two-cents worth;

"So, in other words, life causes cancer."

We all looked up, surprised yet delighted by our young charge's keen insight.

No life, no cancer.

Indeed. It's as simple as that. Moments like that remind me of my fortune cookie's sage advice.

Listening is the real key to learning. So it's true about teaching, as well. We congratulated him for his contribution to the discussion. He beamed with pride, and just a bit of boyish embarrassment at the fuss we were making over him.

For my part, I gave him a wry smile and fond pat on the back myself, having just learned a great lesson from this 12-year old boy who had become a regular in my classes.

And so it goes today, as well. Because even after realizing that you might have talked too much and not listened enough in a recent field-excursion, you'll still know you've had a very real impact on the critical-thinking skills of your former audience…when you hear one of them telling others what they've just learned from you…in their own voice…with their own words.

We were born with ears to hear the world happening around us, but listening takes years to master. Some people never do get the hang of it. Often, and sadly, to their own detriment.

Learning and teaching, giving and taking, these are the intertwined parts of an age-old human-procession that precedes and follows anyone who dares to lead educational field-trips into the great natural mystery…the outside, so to speak…

what I've come to know and treasure…as #PlanetEarthAndTheGreatBeyond!

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Previous Next "The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.."

Jesuit teachingThe Society of Jesus "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

VoltaireFrench Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous "The only certainty is that nothing is certain."

Pliny the Elder Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

Vincent Van Gogh;Dutch Post-Impressionist painter "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

William GibsonAmerican-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist, pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk "Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth."

Nipsey HussleAmerican rapper "Certainty is the death of wisdom, thought, creativity."

Shekhar KapurIndian film director, actor, and film producer "It's false certainty that worries me...I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know."

Sam HarrisAmerican philosopher, neuroscientist, and author "If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom."

Lord ByronEnglish poet and peer "Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932 "Inquiry is fatal to certainty."

Will DurantAmerican writer, historian, and philosopher "The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind."

May SartonAmerican poet, novelist, and memoirist Previous Next

Certain Doubt

How many times has the come-on "We're certain. Trust us" been used in the course of human history? As a former biologist and marine science educator in the Florida Keys I've grown to understand the ominous nature of this proclamation from a full-circle standpoint.

How? Simple. By realizing that I once did it myself. And I'm here to correct that mistake today.

Kind of. Let me explain…

I've finally learned to question any story that resonates with me as deeply this one. As a scientist, wanting an ostensible result to be proven true is a clear sign you're in dicey territory. We have the scientific method for corralling that human frailty, and thank goodness for it.

As a young scientist, I was overly prone to trust my mentors over the lack of evidence none of us bothered to verify. In my homework for this podcast regarding what really did happen, I learned that nobody had.

There is almost no more societally-polarizing topic in Ecology than habitat destruction. Our human inclination is autonomy, love of freedom, and a vigorous struggle against any barriers to our "free will". Being told "you can't build anything here" is pure anathema to that basic human point of view.

In this tale, that assault of our freedom is filed under "pest-control"; namely, Mosquitoes. I grew up in Illinois, actively camping as a Boy Scout all over the country. I came to know most of the unpleasant seeming "pestilence" a kid can encounter in the #GreatOutdoors. As an outdoors-man, and limiting the discussion to animals not plants, I have found that these particular blood-sucking insects are not only annoying, their bites and stings can transmit to us any number of truly nasty diseases.

Malaria is the chief villain in many a human effort to live in the tropics. But Yellow Fever was never far behind, historically, along with some recent discoveries like Dengue and Zika. The word "recent" has an interesting role here when you consider that the ancient fight for control of the Mediterranean Sea involving the Greeks in Syracuse, Romans, and Carthaginians in the Punic Wars was mitigated in large part by disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Finding ways to successfully colonize every corner of planet Earth, humanity's answer to settling in the tropic is an age-old story itself. Habitat destruction became and has remained the default strategy in coping with the most diminutive predators on earth. The term parasites reminds us that the label "apex predator" is a bit of a self-contradictory term.

Returning to more modern and locale specific times, by 1838 the growing population in Florida, then clamoring for statehood, was beginning to complain loudly to its civic leaders about the mosquito problem. A harbinger of ignorant wisdom came from various other states in the person of John Randolph of Virginia, who warned his fellow congressmen in 1835 against voting Florida into statehood. He argued that the land would never become habitable due to "swamps, quagmires, alligators and mosquitoes."

Legal, or at least not illegal habitat destruction began here in the "New World" not long after we'd established this new country. “What good are they anyway? Let’s get rid of them” became the shared civic sentiment in many places regardless of referring to mosquitoes, bison, wolves, or prairie dogs. The mosquito problem was hardly new, having come to national attention in 1905 when, after years of Statewide deaths due to mosquito-borne illnesses, the great Yellow Fever epidemic of 1900 hit New Orleans. "In 1905, following a tremendous effort by scientists to link disease transmission to mosquito vectors, the first area-wide mosquito control program in the City of New Orleans was implemented."

Florida's Anti-Mosquito Association was formed in 1922, and the Legislature created the first mosquito control district, the Indian River Mosquito Control District, in 1925 in conjunction with the formation of Indian River County. The St. Lucie Mosquito Control District was formed a year later in 1926. Early permanent control efforts focused on hand ditching, some diking and dewatering, and proposed some dredge and fill work. The Great Depression's "Work Projects Administration (WPA)" constructed 1,500 miles of ditches in Florida's salt marshes by hand or with explosives.

Perhaps the most significant mosquito control event in Florida was the creation of State funds through the efforts of Dr. John Mulrennan, Sr. in 1953. This legislatively established program was designated for permanent control work which included dredge and fill, ditching, and impoundment and established the Entomological Research Center, now known as the University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach.

But the truly mortal blow was struck in 1941 when the State passed General Senate Bill 388, allowing for each county to form their own Mosquito Control District in order to tax the locals in order to finance any means necessary to "eradicate mosquito-borne illnesses in their jurisdiction".

I guess now would be a good time to quote the great American Naturalist Aldo Leopold from “Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold”; “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

And tinkering is the best way to put it. There are other species of animal on Earth that use tools to manipulate their local environment, but only human beings can directly transform the very ecology on which their own survival depends in order to make what can only be described as “an easier” or “more comfortable” way to live off Earth’s natural bounty.

That's just about when I enter the fray, teaching students allegorical information about this very effort as having been demonstrated with applications of empiricism. 45 years ago.

Here's the story I told, parroting what was told to me by those who came before me; "After World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers, well known as crack construction hands, were underutilized. Never trained, or even expected to operate like scientists, they claimed to have figured out a solution with the essential validating claim “We just know we’re right”. And, sadly, no one with enough power stood up and said “Prove it!”

So Monroe County, the southern Everglades and The Keys, became a test-zone for the State of Florida despite the wise warnings from those few experts who had undertaken to study and research the problem in order to understand the natural world better.

The Florida Senate's General Bill 388 created "Mosquito Control Districts", gave the go-ahead, read “designated the funding via the power of local taxation”, to dig a series of shallow canals no more than 12” deep…to protect endangered and protected the Key Deer…by 6” across, all leading from the islands’ interiors to the shoreline to drain off the large amounts of standing-rainwater “known” to be harboring the mosquito larvae that hatched to then attack the citizens a few days after every rainstorm. And from May through November the tropical weather pattern means it rains somewhere in the 120-mile long island chain every day. And night. Some days everywhere.

The “we just know” kicker was their self-proclaimed, rather self-congratulatory “knowledge of the ecosystem” flourish. They would add killifish, “known” to be voracious consumers of recently hatched mosquito larvae. Which was true…partially.

Moving ahead a year or so, the project was completed, and everyone waited to see the results. As reported anecdotally by those same beleaguered citizens, the problem got worse. Noticeably worse. Even much worse for some. Enough controversy erupted that another set of subject-matter experts was consulted, then brought in to research the issue. This time scientists who studied Ecology, not Pest Control.

In rather short order the following set of facts was generated, and the answer to “What happened?” turned out to be “You didn’t just know. You guessed. And you were completely wrong. About everything you said you ‘knew’”.

Back to science, not allegory.

While the casual observer can indeed watch mosquito larvae developing then hatching in standing rainwater puddles, actual research demonstrated that most of the fresh rain-water that harbors mosquito larvae on the island chain is sequestered on the undersides of the leaves of trees, palmettos, and any of the many types of sub-tropical vegetation growing there. Most of it never drains off into the canals.

Of the captured fresh rain-water that does drip off the plant or falls on open-ground, the killifish population it supports make short work of any insect larvae that find their way there. But the main predator of the mosquito, the dragonfly, lays its eggs directly in the standing fresh-water, never in the small droplets hanging off leaves like mosquitoes. And since they also happen to be about 10x larger than mosquito larvae, get eaten first. So the successfully hatched mosquitoes had been unwittingly awarded an environment nearly free of their main predator, allowing them to run rampant over the island and their own warm-blooded prey.

Uh-huh. Whoops is right. Add in the fact that these ditches began filling in with sediment immediately and created small but growing "flood plains", that is to say "more and bigger puddles than before", with no plans or funding to maintain them and the entire debacle ran the full circle of botched bureaucracy pretending to be science."

Beware the old #WeJustKnow gambit. It has a familiar, hollow ring. A mentor taught me that “The truth is ever and always the case.” Indeed. because no matter what we choose to think, the truth stands unassailed. But getting to the truth is far more difficult than temporarily convincing people that your opinion is worthy of becoming theirs.

Guessing is easy. Theorizing is harder. And proving anything is truly difficult. Learning to trust any group of professionals can also be hard, especially in our increasingly technology-intertwined modern lives.

We know this to be true simply because, at one point in time or another, we’ve all succumbed to this very temptation, assuming we know when all we’re really doing is cheering for our preferred outcome. So, ignorance is endless is the moral of this story, I suppose.

We still do not know who dug those mosquito ditches in the lower Florida Keys despite months of my own rather assiduous research . Nor can we say with any authority whom it was that authorized them.

The answer likely resides in the general-ledger of the Monroe County Mosquito Control District were anyone to undertake the task of forensic-accounting their expenditures from 1935 to 1972, when we know the practice was stopped out of the collective understanding that it doesn't work and creates even more ecological imbalance issues than before the ditches were dug.

How do I know this?

Because experience tells me that NO ONE digs trenches in the Key Largo Limestone, the petrified ancient coral reef bed, for fun. Or for free. Someone got paid to create this elaborate network of ditches that slope gently and consistently toward the sea. It requires exacting engineering, hard work in ghastly hot pine-palmetto forests leading to even hotter and more ghastly mangrove swamps.

I know because we did it on our property while laying sunken PVC-conduit to electrify our newest Marine Science Station infrastructure. With a pick, shovel, and jack-hammer. I think I lost a few fillings on those work-crews!

But there I was, teaching those very things with great assurance and nothing but anecdotal evidence to support me in the late 1970's.

Having duly dissed on the Army Corps of Engineers was wrong. A while it still looks as if they may have done the actual ditch-digging themselves, it was clearly not their idea. It never was.

And it's also not true that there was NO GOOD SCIENCE being done on the issue.

The real truth is that the point of the scientific research done into the biology of mosquitoes up until then was finding ways to kill them off. To maximize the comfort and health of human beings rather than protect and preserve the health of the ecosystem that made these places such wonderful places for people to want to live in the first place.

Not "No Science" nor "Bad science"…just the human penchant to treat #SpaceshipEarth as our infinitely forgiving playground rather than the precious and fragile source of all human life that it is. Call it "poorly directed Science".

I've learned that the very worst Science is initiated from certainty…because that's not science, just human intractability trying to pass itself off as empiricism rather than allegory, opinion, and greed inspired lies.

It's the same mindset that pushed me to teach this lesson with a certainty I am sure to have transferred to some others in the very way it came to me. Not for personal profit, mind you, but nonetheless tainted with the motivation to promulgate my own view of Ecology as more factual than I knew at the time. And that's my shame.

"Shame, Shame, Shame!" said Gomer Pyle.

My long quest for wisdom has brought me to a new place, one where I continue to be reminded of all the good reasons that there is no such thing as certainty. That the closest thing any of us can get to certainty is realizing that those who seek it are on the wrong path performing the wrong kind of search.

Perhaps the most important lesson in this, one I hope to have learned once and for all; and that is;

…the opposite of wisdom is not doubt, but certainty!

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Humpback_Whit Welles _CCA_SA_30_Unported Mirounga_angustirostris_Frank Schulenburg_CCA_SA_30_Unported Charles_Darwin_Julius Jääskeläinen_CCA_20_generic California_sea_lions_Rhododendrites_CCA_SA_40_Intl Rainbow_trout_USFWS_PD Jean-Baptiste_de_Lamarck_CCA_PD_100 Walrus_AWeith_CCA_SA_40_Intl Fiona the hippo2_CincinnatiZooTwitter_CCA_SA_30 Carl_von_Linné_Alexander Roslin_CCA_PD_100 Leucothoe eltoni_Copyright_JamesDarwinThomas Previous Next "Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance."

Robert Quillenan American journalist and humorist who for more than a quarter century was "one of the leading purveyors of village nostalgia "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance."

Terry PratchettEnglish humorist, satirist, and author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. "Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care."

Jimmy BuffetAmerican singer-songwriter, musician, author, actor, and businessman. He is best known for his music, which often portrays an "island escapism" lifestyle. "The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech."

Kathleen Troia McFarland;American political candidate, former government official, and political commentator "Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets."

Guru Nanak Gurpurabalso referred to as Bābā Nānak, was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. "I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."

Anais Nin;French-Cuban-American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. "When this unusual crustacean with a greatly enlarged appendage appeared under my microscope after a day of collecting, an image of the shoes Elton John wore as the Pinball Wizard came to mind.”

Dr. James Darwin ThomasProfessor at Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography; Hollywood, Florida. "You don't know Jack... yet! But once you do he's impossible to forget!"

Michelle HughesAlabama author who's self-published 20 books "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing."

Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. "I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there."

Richard Phillips Feynman American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and particle physics. "I do like not knowing where I'm going, wandering in strange woods, whistling and following bread crumbs."

Katherine Matilda Swinton is a British actress. "There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were."

Eunice Kathleen Waymonprofessionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. "Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. "I'm scared of the water, and I hate the sea. I'd be all right if it was clear and I could see what was underneath. But it's the not knowing what's there that freaks me out."

Hannah Mills, MBEBritish competitive sailor and two-time world champion in the Women's 470 class, having won in 2012 and 2019 "When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter. "Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance."

George Bernard ShawIrish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist "The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff."

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. Previous Next

CUSTODI IN MEMORIA John Booker Previous Next John Thomas Booker Jr., Director of Science Education for Seacamp Association Inc. on Big Pine Key, FL , passed away on November 7, 2010 after losing his battle with cancer. A member of NMEA (National Marine Educator's Association) since 1977, John joined FMSEA (Florida Marine Science Educators Association) in 1982 and served as President of FMSEA in 1988-89, hosting the "Back to the Keys" FMSEA Conference in April 1989.

John was a Marine Aquatic Species Collecting Workshop Facilitator since the beginning of the program in 1996. At Seacamp since 1982, John was instrumental in the recruitment and training of marine science staff. John worked to develop new programs, secure and manage grants, recruit and teach college groups, conduct teacher workshops, assist with training SCUBA staff, teach CPR/First Aid to all staff, train boat captains, develop a computer lab and training program, assist with computer management…and so much more. He was also a licensed boat captain and a NAUI SCUBA Instructor.

Most of all, John was a good friend to all. He provided logistical support and technical expertise to many visiting researchers, especially to Coupon Bight and Looe Key, as well as spending many hours around many campfires sharing seafaring tales and listening to John playing his guitar and singing songs of a southern soul and the Sea.

"As my knowledge increased, I soon became aware that the transfer of knowledge from the research community t o the general public is essential. I then became a marine educator."

contributing Tale-Teller

Dr James Darwin Thomas is the former Chair of the Crustacean Collection at The Smithsonian Institution and Professor at Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography; Hollywood, Florida.

He studied Amphipods his entire career, and is an SME (subject matter expert) in Coral Reef Ecology, Marine Science, and Systematic Biology.

Now retired from Florida International University, he continues to lead field education trips all over the world, most recently on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the barrier reef in Belize, Central America.

transcript 14. Then You Don't Know Jack

A Marine Biologist friend of mine ran the training program for Marine Science Instructors and Interns at a sub-tropical Marine Station for years. One of his mantras was "If all you know is the scientific name…you don't know jack!"

I heard him say it once during a seasonal visit and, after waiting until we were alone, offered up a bit of a presumptuous advice, actually a correction, from my own days leading expeditions in field-biology.

He's passed on now, and I can't help but feel a bit remorseful for talking about him in the past tense. Because his memory is alive and well in all the people he taught about the ocean, all of whom are better off for having known him.

Systematics is "the branch of biology that deals with classification and nomenclature; taxonomy", and much thoughtful insight has gone into the formal naming of new species since the days of Lamarck. He's the scientist credited as the first to propose a viable theory of "inheritance of acquired characteristics", more recently referred to as "soft inheritance".

Incorporating the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity. His legacy informed and inspired the research of Charles Darwin, and is credited with the seeds of insight that are the current understanding of the evolutionary process.

According to Wikipedia;

"Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (who lived from 1744 to 1829), often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist. He was a soldier, biologist, and academic, and an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws."

Predating Charles Darwin, who was 20 years old when Lamarck died, the two of them formalized what began with Aristotle, who first formalized describing the "living world" in his own, classically ancient-Greek way;

Around the middle of the 4th century BCE, ancient Greek science had reached a climax…Aristotle was the first to attempt a system of animal classification, in which he contrasted animals containing blood with those that were bloodless.

The animals with blood included those now grouped as mammals (except the whales, which he placed in a separate group), birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fishes.

The bloodless animals were divided into the cephalopods, the higher crustaceans, the insects, and the testaceans, the last group being a collection of all the lower animals.

When discussing our shared world, resorting to classification is critical, meaning we categorize things in a shorthand way that makes our conversations more manageable, if not briefer.

Biologically speaking, taxonomy is the result, despite being rife with disagreements, as is true of all science. The naming of new species has undergone a series of changes and suggested new methods over the years. Yet systematics still suffer from a single unifying, mutually-acceptable way to do so. As we'll see in the rest of this treatise.

Taxonomies are trees, and as such are a particularly good metaphor for human inference. Time, symbolized within a branching hierarchical system of ranks, still dominates most systems of human design or description. We name the things that make up our world because failing to do so means we end up treating them as if they were all the same. While we know they aren't.

Similarity and distance can be thought of as oppositional synonyms. But they're really just labels anchoring opposite ends of a relational-continuum we use to describe aspects of our similar yet different lives and experience.

You might have heard this refrain before; "Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species" is the ranking system that has been recalled by most young students with the mnemonic "Dear King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti".

There are others, a few rather needlessly off-color. Biologists, professionally preoccupied with the study of life as they are, of which sex and digestion figure prominently, are prone to those baser aspects of life. But these three are poplar as well;

- - "Do kindly place candy out for good students" - "Keep pond clean or fish get sick" - "Kings play chess on fancy glass stools"

So the biologists study and find ways to name the things that comprise life in ways that both describe and enlighten. Sometimes they are even amusing.

A great first example is the hippopotamus, first described and named by Linnaeus, in "Systema Naturae" in 1758 as "Hippopotamus amphibius". Carl von Linné was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He's known as the "father of modern taxonomy".

Combing two Greek words, hippos from for "horse" and potamos from "river or rushing water". Formerly labeled "Choeropsis" from the Greek for "having the appearance of a "young pig". What a great example this is of "knowing jack".

Imagine the clarity of the water his "apostles" beheld to note the graceful nature of the hippo as it ran along the river bottoms in search of good grazing areas. More than that, think of the work it took for an 18th Century field biologist to make the trek through the jungle marshes of Africa to finally witness this lumbering land-animal display such grace underwater. The danger, alone, is an incredible thing to consider. Not just from the host of dangerous predators they had to avoid as they travelled, but from the hippos themselves, still the humber one killer of human-beings in Africa today.

"Apostles" is how Linnaeus referred to his many world-traveling colleagues who collected specimens and descriptions for him from the field. Sweden, at the time, was beset by economic depression, limiting his own scientific expeditions to Scandinavia.

It's clear from just this first example how knowing the scientific name of an organism means you do know something. More than "jack", at any rate. Other great examples of "the scientific name telling us more than jack"?

Humpback Whale; Megaptera novaeangliae

“Their scientific name is derived from the Greek words “mega” meaning large and “pteron” meaning wing (referring to their long pectoral flippers which are one third of their total body length) and “novaeanglia” meaning New Englander because they were described from New England, USA in 1781.”

Pinnipedia; seals, sea-lions, walrus;

it's from the modern Latin (plural), from Latin pinna ‘wing, fin’ + pes, ped- which means foot. They're referred to now as "the fin or feather-footed animals". Feather because there's been some disagreement among linguists about the word-root pes and ped, apparently used interchangeably to refer to feet and wings depending on the context of land animals or birds.

Seals; genus Phoca (Latin; sea-calf)

Sea Lions; genus Otarridae; New Latin Otaria + -idae, from Ancient Greek, “little ear”). These are the "eared seals", often featured as the performing seals in zoos and aquaria, who sport a prominent external ear, or pina, that the true seals lack, who can hear quite well but have ears that are wholly internal

Walrus; genus Odobendae; Odobenus comes from the Greek: "tooth walker", and refers to the walruses' method of pulling themselves up onto the ice with their long tusks

The there's the...

Northern Elephant Seal, Mirounga angustirostris; this is the largest of the pinnipeds, a true seal, or phoca, but so large many thought them to be a distinct genus. Weighing up to 5,000 pounds the males are famous for their long drawn-out battles for territory on the mating beaches of California and western Mexico and Southern hemisphere locales of southern New Zealand, Australia, South America, and South Africa, where its cousin the larger southern elephant seal lives, males topping out at nearly 6,000 pounds.

“The generic name Mirounga is a Latinization of miouroung, which is said to have been a term for the seal in Australian Aboriginal language. However, it is not known which language this represents.” Angustirostris; New Latin; from angustus meaning (“narrow”) + rōstrum meaning (“beak”), which is an accurate description of its strange looking head and large elephantine "trunk"l angustorostris, "narrow beak".

Another descriptive example is the...

Rainbow Trout; Oncorhynchus mykiss

Originally named by German naturalist and taxonomist Johann Julius Walbaum in 1792, it's based on specimens from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. Walbaum's original species name, mykiss, was derived from the local Kamchatkan name used for the fish, mykizha. The name of the genus is from the Greek onkos ("hook") and rynchos ("nose"), referring to the hooked jaws of males in the mating season.

But my favorite of all was named by a friend, Dr. James Darwin Thomas, a Systematic Biology expert who once held the Chair of the Crustacean Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Amphipods, a tiny crustacean, are his specialty.

Leucothoe eltoni is an amphipod he recently identified, characterized, and named. Here he is explaining why he named it in honor of Elton John;

"I named the species in honor of Sir Elton John because I have listened to his music in my lab during my entire scientific career. So, when this unusual crustacean with a greatly enlarged appendage appeared under my microscope after a day of collecting, an image of the shoes Elton John wore as the Pinball Wizard came to mind.”

Descriptive? And how!

Is it useful biologically? Well, the genus Leucothoe, certainly is. But the species, eltoni? You be the judge.

When you spend half your life underwater collecting tiny crustaceans that live inside sponges and tunicates on coral reefs and the other half in your lab peering into microscopes counting and measuring in what is known as "cladistics", a mathematical technique of classification also known as numerical taxonomy, you get to name them whatever you want. And you have to admit, thinking of Elton John's penchant for outlandish costumes, this amphipod's iridescent claws are described rather neatly, and creatively, in memory of his sparkling shoes.

When all was said and done, it turns out that my Science Directing and Intern-training friend adjusted his original mantra. After this, he admonished his charges with slightly more experience and acquired insight of a thoroughly dedicated interpreter of nature;

"If all you know is the scientific name…then you don't know much!"

Which is far more accurate, since all of these names contain a smattering of mostly descriptive information, but hardly scratch the surface of their complex uniqueness. And so it goes with #Science.

As Confucius taught; "training is endless". And despite chipping away at him with relentless exploration, research, and deep study…so is "Jack"!

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Back To Basics

California Sea Lions; ⒸPieter Folkens Pier39; ⒸThe New York Times; Merlin ©The Marine Mammal Center California Sea Lio in La Jolla, CA; ⒸCC(SA_PD) TMMC rescue; ®BrianSimuro & TMMC CSLs at Pier39; ⒸPier39 CSLs and the Blue&Gold Fleet; ©Orange County Register Sea-Gull at Pier39; ©Reddit Guadalupe Fur Seal; ©The Marine Mammal Center Tim Vogel; ©Dr David Guggenheim at The OceanDoctordotcom Previous Next "I can't analyse the secret of success. In my style of working, I stick to the basics and make stories revolving around the hero."

S. S. Rajamouli; Indian film director and screenwriter "You have to be creative. It's the basics. You can't be Picasso unless you know how to draw a real face; then you can turn it upside down."

Diane EnglishAmerican screenwriter, producer and director Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

John DoeCEO "I don't think that the basics that kids need have changed in 10,000 years"

Fred Rogers (also known as Mister Rogers)American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. "I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then."

Umberto EcoItalian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator, and novelist "Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis."

Theodor Reik; German psychoanalyst, trained as one of Freud's first students in Vienna, Austria "Maths is like a ladder - if you miss the first few rungs, you can't jump up, so start with the basics."

Rachel RileyBritish television presenter "Emotions are the basics of any art form!"

Jean-Michel JarreFrench composer, performer and record producer "I sometimes get accused of being 'faux-naive,' but for me, it's really just about getting down to the basics of something."

Louis TherouxBritish-American documentary filmmaker, journalist, broadcaster, and author Previous Next

Back To The Basics

People love the natural world. We go to national parks, state parks, parks in the city, drive out to the grandparents’ farm for the day, or just take family walks around the block together on a brisk autumn evening.

And wildlife often overlaps with these forays. Like at San Francisco’s Pier39 on the Embarcadero. You know, K-dock, where the “world famous California Sea Lions" haul out.

I've been a volunteer-naturalist for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito California for years. They rescue, rehabilitate, and release marine mammals along 600 miles of the Central and Northern California coast.

We taught Marine Mammalogy there every Saturday afternoon for 10 years. Whether the crowds came to see the sea lions or just chow down on some Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, hundreds of people from all over the world would pass by during an afternoon session. And everyone stopped.

Some, just to bark back at the noisy pinnipeds, laughing at themselves, then moving on. Others stayed for an hour, or more. Their interest levels and motivations differed, but wild animals hanging out in the middle of one of the world's most famous cities appeals to everyone.

It's unique…you can spot Moose strolling through downtown Anchorage, Elk gathered in Jackson Hole's town-square, and the Barbary Macaques are a fixture at the rock Of Gibraltar in Spain…but other than that, the spectacle of "critters among us" is not at all common.

But if the crowd spots an animal in distress, as we did sometimes, the mood changed quite quickly.

As Volunteer Naturalists for TMMC we had a direct line to our mostly volunteer Rescue-Capture team. That’s 1-800-289-SEAL . They have the training, Federal permits, and equipment to do the job. We explained the situation and out they came. On this day that included a tranquilizer dart gun with a cocktail of sedatives.

Because an extremely emaciated, entangled, and shark-bitten yearling had been evading capture for months.Having been reported up and down the coast by citizens at large for weeks. I started referring to him as Houdini.

But the crowd didn’t know that we’d been trying to catch him for weeks. All they knew was that “someone needs to get out there and do something right now!”

They were morphing into agitated-crowd state, something no one likes to see. Especially not me, a hundred pairs of eyes staring at me like I had something to do with the sea lion’s injuries.

Our rescue crew showed up in a boat and van with cages, nets, and water-crew, just as the crowd was growing in size. That unmistakable buzz of “something's up” getting near hostile territory.

Not always wise, if ever, a crowd is uncannily good at getting outraged at the same thing at the same time. The shared rowdy-discontent starts with low grumbling, leading to cries of alarm and dismay, followed by shouted advice once they figure out what is going on.

The Chief Veterinarian was leading the crew that day, mostly because of the delicacy in tranquilizing animals that can easily swim away and drown. He came over and asked me to control the growing, noisy crowd by keeping them informed about what was going on, a rescue-play-by-play as it were.

It was fun. But difficult. And a bit exhausting, too, since the entire crazy rescue took about 45 minutes. I dug deep and came up with my first assignment in "public-shouting". Without a microphone or bullhorn. High-school speech class helped here.

“Project,” Ms. MacGregor would say, “the people in the back row can’t hear you!”

I started with the basics;

- what had led up to this day.
- why tranquilizing swimming mammals is inherently dangerous.
- how disruptive the activity is to the rest of the animals there, since they all go back into he cold water until the invading rescue crew has left the area.
- and even a bit about the sedatives used in the tranquilizer-cocktail we designed for just this kind of rescue.

I peppered my play-by-play narrative with reports on the activity happening right in front of us, which was sporadic but got pretty crazy real fast.

As predicted, the rescue started with the other 300 sea lions immediately jumping off the floats back into the cold water as the first rescue-diver approached their floating rafts. They swam around the basin, loudly complaining at us for disturbing their rest. But our divers had secretly surrounded the pier with our victim, swimming underwater then popping up at just the right moment to prevent him from escaping.

The entire rescue involved;

- 3 trucks, 4 different sized cages, and about 20 staff.
- 15 divers in wetsuits wearing masks, fins, and snorkels trying to keep our target on one dock while hoping to catch it in one of our capture-nets as it jumped into the water to escape.
- three tranquilizer darts to hit the right spot, then fully sedate the young sea lion.
- several dramatically harrowing misses at getting the woozy critter to jump into one of our customized capture nets.
- and the crowd supplying all the dramatic backdrop of a live gameshow on TV.

The crowd's mood had changed dramatically from when the rescuers had first arrived. They'd gone from an angry mob to an engaged crowd. Like home-town fans, they cheered for the effort like the San Francisco Giants were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The first two shots bounced off the critter's emaciated, bony hips. Each miss was followed by a group sigh, sounding like an apparent home-run shot turned into a foul-ball by the wind. It was the last shot that got him, in what was left of his haunches. The crowd cheered like we'd just own the world Series with a walk-off Grand-Slam.

After frantically running back-and-forth, from one side of the pier to the other, looking for an escape route, the exhausted sea-lion took a desperate leap off its pier. It landed in a good friend’s rectangular net. The other divers quickly converged, helping lifting it out of the water and into a portable-cage for transport to our hospital across the bay.

The final capture only took one try, the crowd gasping audibly as my friend gave a huge kick of his fins to get his rectangular net under Houdini as it leaped off the pier into the water.

An experienced rescuer, he later claimed the move as his greatest catch ever!

All in all it was an eventful afternoon of interpreting the natural world. It was good to see how much empathy the diverse crowd shared for the suffering animal. And I was thrilled to see how just a little information could change a crowd dynamic from mad and ugly to happy and supportive.

That’s when you know you’ve piqued a few minds into a new way of thinking. Perhaps only for that afternoon, but when one’s overall goal is elevating our collective awareness of the natural-world we depend upon for life itself…

any movement toward “the light” is something worth trying to repeat!

I'd been reminded of another valuable lesson. Pay attention to the basics. They make a huge difference in everything we do.

The memory makes me think of the 3-R's, the world's short-list for any anyone's basic educational;

"…Readin-Writin'-and-'Rithmetic…"

I've since added a 4th R…recall…

because, without memory, there is no learning…we've only learned a lesson when recalled just when we it the most!

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Training Is Endless

Fire Ants; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-2.0) Big Pine Key; ©Google Maps Golden Orb Weaver; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-2.0) The toxic Manchineel Tree; Hippomane_mancinella; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-3.0) The east4rn Diamondback Rattlesnake, Crotalus_adamanteu; ©Wikimedia COmmons (PD-2.0) The Eastern Coral Snake, red-net-to-yellow; ©USFWS from Wikimedia Commons Red_imported-Fire-Ant (RIFA) mound; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-1.0) RIFA bites on leg; © Healthlinedotcom American Alligator; ©USFWS from Wikimedia Commons (PD-2.0) Tropical hardwood-hammock on Everglades National Park Mahogany_Hammock Trail; ©US National Park Service Previous Next “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Louis Pasteur; French chemist and microbiologist "I don't really think about the degree of difficulty or the possibility of making a mistake. I just try to relax and let my preparation and training take over."

Simone Biles; American artistic gymnast, with 32 Olympic and World Championship medals. "Luck is where opportunity meets preparation."

Seneca; Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist "Life is a long preparation for something that never happens."

William Butler Yeats; Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer "It's the preparation that's my favourite part of the process."

Ruth Wilson; English actress. "Be Prepared... the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise."

Robert Baden-Powell; Founder of the Boy Scouts Previous Next

Training Is Endless

Confucius taught that #TrainingIsEndless; and so it is.

Wherever you find outdoor education you’ll find an intern program. They go together. It’s much easier to underpay your teaching staff when you can exchange them for a few free-workers, recent (or soon to be) college graduates desperately seeking their first professional field experience.

So it’s not surprising to find a fairly wide range of skill-sets and experience to deal with when you have to train 3 seasons of interns (Fall, Spring, and Summer). Our entire program was built on providing that very same service for the inexperienced layman, after all.

Our spot in the Florida Keys was packed with a variety of marine habitats for teaching the Marine Sciences, so we attracted many such students. But we also had a unique geology in the lower Keys that made a lot of terrestrial biology accessible to our programs, as well.

On Big Pine Key it’s possible to climb to the nose-bleed height of 12’ above sea-level, the highest point in the Florida Keys. Hardly alpine, those elevated areas have managed to build impressive forests, harboring an abundance of biota, plants and animals.

The Pine-Palmetto Fire-Climax Community drives most of the lower Florida Keys terrestrial-ecology.

People don't think of plants as being particularly competitive, a trait they routinely attribute to animals. But all terrestrial ecosystems start with plants. They set the stage for other species, plant and animal, that can find a way to eke out a living there.

In reality, plants are essentially at war with one another. They compete for space on the ground to take root, the water and nutrients that exist in that shared soil, and the space above the ground for they need to gather sunlight for their photosynthesis.

With Florida's hot climate and cycle of wet-dry seasons, fires routinely kill off any hardwoods that take root in the under-canopy. The palmettos, with their flammable leaves, tend to set them them fire while the much taller Slash Pines are hardly even affected. Until the fire gets so intense it tops them, too.

That's when succession occurs. Since hardwoods grow much faster than pine-tees, once a forest dominated by pines is wiped out by fire, the deciduous trees "succeed" that forest. In the Florida Keys these area are referred to as hardwood-hammocks. Trees like the mahogany, gumbo-limbo, autograph-tree, lignum vitae, manchineel, wax-myrtle, poisonwood, and pigeon-plum are most common.

So, that day, we were “teaching the would-be teachers”, introducing the various areas we used for the wide variety of science in our curriculum. The hardwood-hammock was that day's lesson.

Our students generally came for a standard two-day visit. But many groups stayed longer, so extending our program to include a variety of the scientific disciplines, and for which we had excellent access to specific ecosystems for field education, was mission critical.

For this story, that notion extends to a toxic tree called the Manchineel, the most toxic tree known in the Americas and the "Red Imported Fire Ant", named because of the burning sensation caused by its sting.

In defense of our two, soon-to-be victimized interns, the hardwood hammocks are havens for plenty of surprises for the unaware;

- the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake
- the Eastern Coral Snake
- the Florida Alligator
- imposingly large golden orb-weaver spiders that spin large webs across the trails
- the American Saltwater Crocodile
- mosquitoes by the million
- the incredibly irritating no-se-ums (blue midges)
- the Fire Ant

all growing amid an overgrown forest of hardwood trees like Gumbo Limbo, Autograph, Mahogany, Cypress, Lignum Vitae, and Oak trees, all substrate for epiphytes like Spanish Moss and native orchids.

Not to mention several forms of local toxic trees that gave a nasty poison-ivy like rash; the passive the Poisonwood and Manchineel.

In other words, there was lots to look out for. Good to know in general, but critical need-to-know information if you planned on leading groups of students in there to experience “nature”!

We warned everyone before we entered to keep their eyes and ears open since failing to so would be less dangerous than it was uncomfortable, unless someone stepped on a rattlesnake or sat down next to a resting alligator.

On this day, however, while discussing the role of fire in forming this community (the SouthernPine-Palmetto fire-climax community), two just such “educational” events occurred at once.

One of our Environmental-Education Interns managed to step on a fire-ant hill without knowing it, giving us all an impromptu but passionate demonstration of #TheStriptease, combined with #TheFireAntDance.

It varies from person to person, but is always characterized by frantic yelling, tearing one’s pants off as quickly as possible, repeatedly slapping at the lower legs, and dancing around in circles like a spaz with pants-around-ankles trying to extinguish the stinging “fire”.

Meanwhile, the Intern in a new program we started the year before, “Marine Archaeology”, had rather dreamily wandered away from the crowd. She decided to taste the fruit of the Manchineel Tree, teaching us all (especially her) that the burns one gets from its toxins can last for over two weeks.

They both “learned the hard way.” But now they “knew” several things they didn't know before the class started.

That there was a local fruit none they would never consider putting in a sack lunch. The intricacies of #TheFireAntDance.

And never, never wear long pants if there’s the possibility of a fire-ant attack. But, if you must, at least make sure you wear clean underwear that day!

Tales From The Outside: Recent Episodes

Timothy Vogel