Category: Evolution

Beware Mami Wata

Beware Mami Wata

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

westafricanmanateeSome very deep West African superstitions may be the last great barrier and yet also the last great hope for saving the rare African manatee, a creature on the brink of extinction.

The manatee and elephant share a common ancestor they evolved from about 100 million years ago. Their evolutionary story is pretty well known, but unlike the South American (Trichechus inunguis) and West Indian (T. manatus) cousins, the West African manatee (T. senegalensis) has only recently attracted conservation efforts. In part this is because so little was known about the animal and some scientists had long ago thought it extinct.

The South American manatee lives in fresh water; the other two in salt water, and it’s the West African manatee’s habitat mostly among coastal mangrove swamps and inland marshes that so threatens it.

All three types are slow moving and big, so easily hunted. They feed on certain vegetation also preferred by a number of other marine species that are widely harvested for food, so are usually considered competitors with local fishermen.

For the last seven years saving the West African manatee has been led by a single woman, Lucy Keith Diagne, born, raised and educated in Florida among the State’s prized marine mammal.

It’s been an uphill battle for Lucy, particularly because much of the manatee’s West African range extends into politically troubled areas.

Lucy and others have discovered, though, that the population might be protected at a critical bottom level by local superstitions.

West African spirit beliefs and myths are still very powerful forces in most rural cultures. In ancient times they provided the basic beliefs to all the early societies along the Niger River, which became the basis of Brazilian voodoo, for instance.

So while war is the most formidable obstacle to researching and protecting a wild animal, Lucy discovered that superstition might be, too, but in a surprisingly positive way.

“Mami Wata” is a complex female spirit in West Africa that remains powerful throughout much of the manatee’s range, and frankly, the manatee looks a lot like what I would imagine Mami Wata to be!

Mostly positive and protective, Mami Wata can nevertheless be angered and raised into terribly destructive engagements with people, cursing them to death. For this reason she is mostly left alone and intentionally ignored.

In many parts of rural West Africa it’s presumed the only people who dare to engage Mami Wata are fugitives, renegades and show-offs who usually meet a dire fate.

For this reason, few in these rural areas of West Africa will help researchers locate much less study a manatee, but at the same time the attitude affords a natural protection for the animal.

It will be a long time before this barrier to greater understanding might be developed into sustainable conservation the way Florida has. Manatee in Florida are most often associated with Disneyland and other family fun vacations where certain attractions advertise swimming among them.

They are gentle if bumptious creatures, sometimes called underwater Teddy Bears. In the numerous places in Florida and the West Indies where they’ve been habituated to human swimmers, they are curious enough to produce exciting encounters, but too slow moving to be considered anything but gentle despite their size.

Declining populations in Florida and the West Indies were turned around by making the animal a tourist attraction rather than a hunted animal. The State of Florida designated the manatee as its state marine animal in 1975 and since then a number of programs have so well protected them that the population is now stable.

But it will be a long time before traditions change enough in West Africa that an estuary owner will agree to bring tourists into his pond to swim with Mami Wata.

But that may also be the reason Mami Wata still exists.

Alaska to Africa: It’s Hot

Alaska to Africa: It’s Hot

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments
    Alaska60NI’m on my way to Africa, to 0 degrees latitude. Right now in Arusha it’s 15C (59F). When Bill Zanetti went swimming yesterday in Prince William Sound, at 60N, the water temperature of the ocean was 68F! (20C)

    I flew over the north pole from Anchorage nonstop to Frankfurt, and fortunately for much of the journey there were no clouds. Only at our topmost point on earth was the ice uniform. Everywhere else it was cracked, with huge rivers and passages, and this is only the beginning of summer.

    We saw yellow-bellied flycatchers in Fairbanks; they belong much further south. We saw more humpback whales than most week cruises in Prince William Sound see in July when it’s more normal for them to congregate here.

    We visited the northern-most oyster hatchery on earth, a single man’s operation in the Sound. Oyster Dave normally gets his oyster “seeds” (young oysters) from places like Vancouver, but he now can see the day when oysters will actually breed this far north. All it takes, he said, was a few weeks of 70F water.

    Alaskan waters hit that high temperature once before, in 2007. Unprepared for such warmth, oyster farms in Alaska were hit by the deadly Vibrio virus. Two years later, a “red tide” also attributed to warming temperatures closed down the Alaskan oyster industry.

    “This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is changing the importation of infectious diseases,” said Dr. Joe McLaughlin of the Alaska Division of Public Health who published the Vibrio study.

    Our two-week absolutely fabulous journey through Alaska was characterized by so many wonderful high points it’s hard to summarize, and then I realized that all these “high points” were attributed to unusually beautiful (read: warm and dry) weather.

    Alaska at its best is cool and damp; at its normal wet and cold. Of course there are periods of glorious days of warmth and sunshine, but that’s not normal. At least not until now.

    Cold and wet in Africa but warm and dry in Alaska. I can hear Senator Inofe shouting how global warming is a “hoax!” But global warming doesn’t mean that every single unusual event is warmer. It means overall it’s warmer, and for sure if you average out Africa temperatures with Alaska, you’ve got global warming.

    But more importantly global warming, or for that matter global cooling, coming as ridiculously fast as it is will be noticed primarily in its extremes. Extremes in everything, including coldness. In sum we’re getting warmer, but moving there so fast creates rebounds from weather events that are just as dangerous as the long-term trend.

    And hardly a scientific fact, I was really chilled looking at the North Pole. From my admittedly infinitesimal experience over near 90 degrees latitude, there is no big ice cap, anymore.

    It was great for us, day by day. Mt. McKinley was out almost constantly, and our flightseeing around the mountain was unobscured by a single whiff of cloud.

    Hiking in Denali was a cinch. You didn’t even need the rubber boots that every lodge and camp in the area insists you bring, because the tundra while soft wasn’t damp.

    The bouquet of wildflowers on our hikes near the Eaglek Inlet was really profound: Wild rose, skort, wiggelwort, skunk cabbage, sundew, nagoonberry, dwarf fireweed, bog blue, rosemary avens, shooting stars, dozens of mosses, false heleebores, Labrador tea and blooming water lilies.

    This is a collection of fragile, extraordinarily beautiful flowers that appear quickly and over the course of the summer, collecting the fragmentary and unique moments of warmth and wet in this stressed ecosystem necessary for them to propagate.

    But they’re all here at once! What the hell does this mean?

    It’s a stretch on the pun, but it means it’s too warm; at least too warm for the way we used to understand Alaska and Africa.

    Birds and plants and fishes and whales will all adapt. Many will disappear and be replaced by others; Alaskan scientists are worried that dandelions will replace many of the beautiful little flowers named above. That doesn’t worry me; that’s nature, the beauty of natural selection.

    But while birds and animals and fishes and plants exchange components and reorder themselves for a new, warming world, in order to survive … what are we doing to survive?

    It’s only a hoax, says Senator Inofe. There’s no need to do anything.

Obama/Neanderthal/Romney Debate

Obama/Neanderthal/Romney Debate

by Arusha ♥ 7 Comments

Animus in our culture is pervasive and not just in politics. Recent awe-inspiring discoveries about Neanderthals have enraged the Right, once again.

The various emotions I feel following the Obama/Romney debate are complex, but all so similar to the same emotions provoked by the angry outbursts of creationists over new and exciting Neanderthal discoveries.

Harvard and the Max Planck Institute have been meticulously studying the DNA of Neanderthals for several years, now. Discoveries understandably come out allele by allele, and this week they announced a real breakthrough:

Neanderthals interbred with modern humans a lot more than previously thought, and the two sub-species likely lived peaceably side-by-side for tens of thousands of years. The “disappearance” of the Neanderthal was not a wipe-out by a more warring subspecies – us – but likely assimilation by romance.

As much as 4% of modern man’s DNA is Neanderthal, and that’s incredibly significant. Recent studies also confirm that modern Africans carry less Neanderthal genes than non-Africans, and along with other microbiology and genetics, further confirm relatively stable Neanderthal assimilation into our current species, rather than anything more dramatic.

Regrettably, I now concede one of my most powerful stories given during my lecture at Olduvai, where I wow my clients with the notion that we (homo sapiens sapiens) might have eaten the Neanderthals up!

It was a great story and a plausible notion for years, and the wow came not in some Carl Sagan notion of our intrinsic animus but rather that the Neanderthals, while “smarter” (their brain/body ration might be larger), they lacked something “we” had that allowed us to conquer them. For many years that was presumed to be better language.

The possibility that most of our direct African ancestors were capable of a better manipulation of language than Neanderthals has become more contentious over the years, but it’s not yet fallen from complete grace. So until recently it was a wonderful notion that language trumped IQ.

I concede, but there are enough wow moments in the evolution of man that, other than having to redo my lesson plan, I still have full faith in the energy of the lecture!

But not for creationists. The recent discoveries have just angered them, further.

A couple weeks before the Harvard/Planck study was announced, there was new archaeological evidence that Neanderthals were peaceful, and separately, that Neanderthal decorated himself with bird feathers.

That was not so profound from my point of view, but the creationists went ape about it:

“More breaking news from this week about Neanderthal man, they found feathers in his living arrangement and it was not there by accident rather it was there by intelligent design!”

The quote above is from one of the leading creationists. Take a minute to scan all the recent posts under his rubric of “archaeology” and you’ll collect his enormous animus.

You’ll note reference after reference about science’s notion of Neanderthal as an oaf. When quite to the contrary, for years there’s been nothing in scientific discovery to suggest Neanderthal were less smart than us! In fact, if the brain/body weight argument regains traction, it can be plausibly argued they were smarter!

This creationist isn’t a god-fearing man displaying disdain or arrogance about science’s mistakes about the heavens. It’s an animal filled with anger. And it brings me back to the Romney/Obama debate, because the collection of emotions are similar.

Truth matters. In fact it apparently matters so much that it creates anger in those who deny it. And when that anger is sufficiently mobilized by celebration, the dynamic begins to be powered by less, not more, truth.

So just say something again and again that is a lie, or claim you don’t believe something you do (or once did), and you’re right on the same squad as Darth Nader, denying the truth and somehow remarkably gaining energy from doing so.

And at this point rational debate goes to pot. Evil trumps good.

We ought to take some lessons from our early ancestors. There was less animus and more romance than we ever thought possible.

Is this Obama’s secret? But will it win the House?

Who’s the Most Advanced?

Who’s the Most Advanced?

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

It’s been nearly a month since the complete bonobo genome was published, and it’s absolutely astounding how American creationists dispute the science.

This is the last of the great apes to be sequenced and completes a body of data that can significantly increase our understanding of human evolution.

Bonobos live in central Africa, an endangered primate now proved no closer to humans than chimpanzees. This first great discovery contrasts with primatologists’ presumptions based on anatomy and to a lesser extent, behavior, that had held bonobos were the closest of the great apes to man.

Confirmed is that great apes — chimps, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas and man — are remarkably closely related. This was never in doubt, at least not by rational thinkers. So the excitement of the genome is the evidence now being dissected that will more exactly draw the evolutionary timeline of primate divergence, and the possibility that complete genomes can provide evidence for behaviorial evolution.

The initial theories are pretty exciting. They suggest that the divergence between the common ancestor of all existing primates, including man, was as early as 4½ million years ago. This confirms further that quite a few stars of early hominid development, including the earliest Australopithecines, were not our ancestors, but divergent dead-ends from even earlier common ancestors to our common primate extant ancestor.

And much more interesting information is on the way. Such as the importance of rivers as effective separators of hominid evolution. Or whether the most successful hominid behavior is either “Make Love, Not War” or “Make War, Not Love” as the eminent University of Wisconsin scientist, John Hawks, told the Los Angeles Times.

But the sad story in all of this is how warped America has tried to deny the findings. The leading idiocy is from the heavily funded Institute for Creation Research.

Their resident “scholar”, a Ph.D. of no significance, Jeffrey Tomkins, berated the Nature article and all the corresponding good reporting about it as “misrepresented.”

In what even to this humble laymen was just plain dumb, Tomkins focused on the genetic difference that was shown to exist between the existing great apes, then tried unsuccessfully to extrapolate the notion that they are therefore not of the same stock (have no common ancestor).

As has been the case for the last several decades, scientists mostly ignore this stuff. But I did find one scientist, Ricki Lewis, whose personal analysis of the Nature paper specifically debunks Tomkins.

And has also been the case for the last several decades, Tomkins’ scientific-sounding article was picked up by literally hundreds of religious journals, which then propagated even more blatant misrepresentation and poor analysis of the facts. You can’t exactly call it a lie, but it’s very close.

Do a Google search on Tomkins’ article, and you’ll be amazed with the endless number of mouthpieces – all American – for this nonsense. It’s truly depressing.

Facts and science, today, are being cast aside by this quirky segment of America, and it’s one thing simply to call them out and move on. But we’ve tried that. And while fortunately polling is on our side, and scientific facts like global warming and evolution are miserably slowly making their way into the normal fabric of American life, the outlanders are tenacious and vicious.

So while the actual number of creationists may be slowly reducing, those that remain are getting more and more powerful. They are “cleansing” school textbooks of science, for example, and packing it with their nonsense.

Belief in the simply untrue leads people into weird behaviors, not least of which is voting against their own self-interest. So rejoice that the completion of the great ape genome project gives us so much complete science about evolution that it will be even harder to dispute.

But beware the powers amassed to suppress it. And not just because of the denial of evolution, but for the integrity of all science in America.

Weeding the World

Weeding the World

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

The loss of wilderness critically impacts our lives. African compromises known as “same species intervention” and “protected wilderness” may be bitter sweet solutions.

I just returned from a visit to the Amazon where I saw first hand the destruction of the planet’s jungles, the transformation of its rivers into commercial pathways for man’s insatiable consumables, and the slaughter of its wildlife.

But as sad as this is to see, it’s nothing new. I’ve watched it happen my whole life in Africa.

The human/wildlife conflict is well known and less contentious, really, than simply troubling. When a decision must be made to choose between man or wildlife, or between man’s survival or the destruction of the wilderness, there’s no question in my mind that man must prevail.

Many have argued that conflict doesn’t exist: that man and the wild are never completely at odds with one another, that both can be preserved. But I think that’s either nonsense or simply employing impractical logic. We cannot reverse quickly enough our use of fossil fuels, our need to eradicate poverty, or our endless warring ways, to abate the destruction of the wild in any macro economic way.

More reasoned intellects argue that we are essentially crippling ourselves each time we cripple the wilderness. And there is powerful evidence to support this, not least of which are the many organic drugs discovered in the natural wild. But this becomes an odds game. What are the chances we’ll find another cancer drug in the Amazon before Rio’s favelas either waste away in cholera or typhoid or explode in revolution?

And the finally there’s that ludicrous notion that we can make wild, wild. Pull out that garlic mustard plant, John, and save the wilderness from itself!

What we don’t get is that the wild nature of the wilderness, its own ability to decide what to do with itself, is critical to the very nature of man; after all, we are an organic beast. If we disown the wild by claiming we know better than its intrinsic self how to preserve itself, we disown part of our own essence. Is that necessary?

It’s taking an enormous risk. We’re gambling that we don’t need to know the things of the wild that for the moment remain its mysteries. Pluck that garlic mustard and who knows what else you’re plucking from existence!

I think Africa may be providing a couple compromises. They aren’t holistic solutions, but it may be the best we can do.

Yesterday “Gorilla Doctors” treated a festering wound of a silverback who had been in a fight with another male. They did this by darting the animal with a powerful antibiotic.

The group also reported a rather quiet start to June, with “few interventions” that nonetheless included anti-biotic treatments of juveniles and darts of anti-inflammatory drugs to relieve pain.

Gorilla Doctors is a new phenomena in my life time. I remember in the mid 1980s when scientists argued for months over whether to intervene in two crisis situations in the wildernesses of east and central Africa.

The first involved the mountain gorillas. One of the animals was identified as suffering from measles. The only possible way that could have happened is that a tourist had transmitted it to them. The question was, do we use the simple and available medicines we have available to cure the disease, or do we let the baby gorilla die?

There were two compelling arguments to treat the baby gorilla. The first was that man himself had upset the balance of the wild, since it was man that introduced the disease. The second was that the disease had an epidemic potential. If not treated, the entire population was at a greater risk of extinction.

The decision to intervene is not reversible. It sets the stage for an uncommon relationship between man and the wild he wants to protect. Once the vaccine was used, every baby gorilla that was subsequently born would have to be vaccinated. Just like humans. And that’s exactly what’s happened.

Not too long thereafter, mange raced through the population of cheetah living on the East African plains. This beautiful cat is highly inbred, which means that throughout its wild population any disease can be devastating. Mange is ridiculously easy to cure. Just puff a bit of antibiotic powder pretty randomly over some part of the animal near an orifice and poof, cured.

And that’s what was done.

Since these first two breakthrough interventions in the wild, intervention has developed exponentially. And the justifications for them have become less and less simple. Successful vaccinations of pet and feral dog populations on the periphery of wild dog populations proved successful in increasing wild dog populations. But now, it appears the wild dogs must be vaccinated, too.

Each one of these interventions alters something that was wild into something less so, but ensures the preservation of that alteration with much greater certainty than its original wild form. We call this “same species intervention.”

This stands in marked contrast to plucking garlic mustard from county preserves. Same species intervention attempts to preserve a life form (mountain gorillas, cheetah) without altering the biomass around it. The second presumes to prevent destruction of other life forms by eliminating the first (garlic mustard for who knows what).

I find the first strategy tolerable; the second not. Both strategies tamper with the mysteries of the wild, but the second strategy tampers with too many mysteries, it exceeds the threshold of destroying one thing for another.

But these examples of deciding how to preserve life forms are only a part of the story. In fact, perhaps the smaller part.

Human/wildlife conflict is more pronounced than ever. It comes as no surprise but our preparation for its arrival was negligent. Elephants destroying farms, schools, threatening bicyclists and cars; lions worse than coyotes or wolves for taking down farm stock; Asian carp or zebra mussels screwing up our sewage systems much less redactional fishing!

Fences.

Africa is fencing all its wilderness. It began years ago with such mammoth projects as the 22,000 sq. mile Etosha National Park in Namibia, or the legendary Kruger National Park in South Africa (where part of the fence has now been removed, by the way).

More recently and at great local expense, Kenya’s huge Aberdare National Park was completely fenced. There are now calls for Kenya’s best park, the Maasai Mara, to be fenced.

“Fence” is a loose term. It could be moats or other types of semi-natural divisions that nevertheless bind the wild in specific containers we can try to preserve from man’s ruthless development.

Putting a boundary on the wild makes it wild no longer. The dynamic system becomes contained. The chaos and mystery of being undefined and unknown ends.

There are many spiritualist’s who believe this is doomsday:

“We perfect perfection to the point of
complete destruction.
And in the end, we will lose it all
as the weeds grow over our fallen creations
and the wonder of the wilderness returns.”

This final paragraph of Lisa Wields’ poem, “Loss of Wilderness Means Loss of Self,” believes this tact will not prevail.

Unfortunately for the past but inevitably compromised for the only possible future… I believe it will.

Old Bones Age Well

Old Bones Age Well

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Mostly praise for PBS’ brilliant production “Bones of Turkana” with only a few important criticisms.

It was specially good to see Richard Leakey so relaxed and forthcoming. He is a man who has lived much of his life under attack or siege and a significant part of his non-paleontological public life remains clouded and unexplained. And until now, anyway, he has been withdrawn and reticent to assume such a grand public mantel.

In the darker days of Kenya under the dictator Daniel Moi, Leakey held two important government posts. The first was head of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the second was head of an anti-corruption unit created in conjunction with the World Bank to rid Kenya of enough back room dealing that aid organizations would feel comfortable working with the country, again.

Both public positions ended in disaster, although there’s little doubt Leakey’s tenure at KWS was enormously good.

I do take issue with the documentary’s claim from Leakey that his pyre of ivory fire almost single-handedly ended the ivory market, thereby saving elephants.

It was much more complicated than that, and certainly Leakey’s strong-man tactics in the KWS, using every power given him by an exceedingly powerful and corrupt dictator, did enormous good to stop the extinction of elephants in Africa.

Before Leakey came to power in the KWS, Kenya had lost 90-95% of its elephants. There was wide speculation that the wife of the first president, Mama Ngina, was involved in the most massive poaching operation.

Leakey definitely stopped this, and the pyre episode was more than emblematic. But Kenya was not the only place in Africa where the problem existed; it was continent-wide. And the largest share of the credit goes to the CITES convention and treaty, initiated by the U.S. and Kenya well before Leakey’s involvement.

And Leakey’s abrupt dismissal (actually, his resignation just prior to dismissal) from the KWS was primarily caused by his stepping on the toes of one very powerful man, Ntimama, who was an ally of the president. And it just shows you, you don’t act like your boss to your boss.

Later Leakey would become the much celebrated head of the “Dream Team” set up to stifle corruption in Kenya. A version of that agency still exists in Kenya and isn’t doing too badly. But his brief tenure there and abrupt departure left many wondering:

(A) Was he just too frustrated without the authority denied him to clean house, or worse (B) was he corrupt, too. Did the head of the snake come round to bite the tail?

That damning accusation remains unanswered and many close to Leakey insist he won’t address it for fear of legitimizing an absurdity. I think that was wrong. Leakey never explained why he left the Dream Team and the accusations remain unanswered.

Leakey was never the affable and sometimes flamboyant star that his father, Lewis, was. From the beginning he was much shyer, assuming I believe the shadow that most white Kenyans lived under during his generation. After all, remember that he lived not just through a global era of emancipation, but in a newly independent country previously ruled by a twelth of the population of which his ancestry played a significant part.

It was actually his mother, Mary, who was the discoverer of Zinj. Yet it was not until after her death in 1980 that scientific publications credited her, rather than her husband, Lewis, with the find.

And to be white, in a newly independent black country, must have been difficult.

And the family was one of the most dysfunctional on earth. There were three feuding sons. One fled to Europe. One became an idiot politician in Kenya on the side of the dictator. And that left Richard as the only publicly sane figure. When Richard needed a kidney to stay alive, the idiot politician balked for months before agreeing to the operation.

I first met him at Jane Goodall’s second wedding in Dar-es-Salaam in 1981. Later I got to know him better when I was working with a Chicago filmmaker, Dugan Rosalini, who tried unsuccessfully to make an early documentary about him. I then lost touch with him until meeting him again at a reception in Chicago honoring the 100th birthday of his father.

Throughout these many years he remained withdrawn, terribly scarred I felt from the two public disasters in Kenya. Yet also during these years his successful scientific battles became legend, and his several books and other publications baseline studies for all paleontologists, today.

So another slight criticism I have with the film is that Leakey’s own explanations of our human origins suggest to the less informed that humans evolved in some linear fashion, from say Australopithecus to habilis to erectus to ourselves.

That had never been Leakey’s position. It was the position of his arch-rival, Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy. Lucy was the closest rival to Turkana Boy in terms of completely found anatomy.

It brewed a terrible and bitter fight between the two men, finally resolved when Johanson conceded in Time magazine’s millennium edition that he had been wrong, and Leakey right.

About what? That human evolution is not linear.

I don’t really think that Leakey intended to imply linear evolution, but the film failed in this regards to highlight how important his opposite view is and was.

There is no doubt in my mind that Leakey is a great man. And not just as a paleontologist. His love of Kenya and attempts to become a valuable civil servant and later politician there were perhaps ahead of his time. And the actual service he provided was probably necessary and beyond realism to suppose anyone else could have performed, then and there.

But the sum total of his life made him an inward man. And this film may have changed that.

Some good wines improve with age. Particularly when left in the dark for a while.

Biggest! Strongest! Smallest!

Biggest! Strongest! Smallest!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A ridiculously small, and a ridiculously large chamaeleon and a ridiculously strong little bird. Africa at its best!

I have personally seen the northern wheatear breeding in Alaska and foraging in Africa, and we’ve not known until now where the Alaskan birds migrated. That’s because there are wheatears in eastern northern Canada and even Greenland and Scotland.

Most bird migrations are determined in a pretty easy way. The bird is banded and then it’s found where it’s migrated to. And dozens and dozens of wheatears have been banded, but they’ve never been found.

That wasn’t actually unimaginable with regards to the wheatear. Unlike most species of bird, the wheatear breeds over a massive portion of the northern hemisphere and there are lots of them. So the odds of a banded bird being found were greatly reduced.

But technology to the rescue! The bird is so small, .8 ounce, that anything other than a light-weight leg band could not be used for tracking, until scientists recently concocted a really itty bitty geolocator hardly heavier than a band. And that’s where this data comes from.

There’s a real surprise, too. The birds in Alaska travel west to Africa. The birds in eastern Canada travel east. The route from Alaska to Africa is impressive: nearly 20,000 miles roundtrip! The eastern migration is half that, but it has to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the world’s most turbulent sea.

So either way around this you’ve got a remarkable little African bird! (Well, it’s also an Alaskan, Canadian, Greenlander, and British Isles bird, too.)

Note: the birds with the longest migration (approaching 50,000 miles) are the arctic tern and winged albatross.

The other fabulous African nature news this week was of still more treasures from Madagascar. We’d already found the world’s largest chamaeleon there. Parson’s chameleon is the size of most cats! Now this week scientists announced the discovery of the world’s smallest chameleon. It can fit on a matchhead!

What is really amazing about this, actually, is that these two creatures from Madagascar although definitely both chamaeleons in many common ways, are probably very different and likely have extremely different evolutionary paths.

Their point of last convergence could conceivably be at the dawn of reptiles, meaning more than 250 million years ago! The fact that they then physically changed so little except in terms of their size, likely has something to do with the special island-continent ecology of Madagascar. Island systems provide narrow paths for evolution, encouraging speciation but then subsequently constricting radical divergence.

On safari we usually find a chameleon or two and always some type of wheatear (there are several). Along with the new snakes and new primates and primate behaviors discovered recently in Tanzania, we’re learning that Africa has much more to reveal than we ever thought before!

First Steps Baby!

First Steps Baby!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Another breakthrough discovery credited to my forlorn African creature, the lungfish! Apparently it was you, not that obdurate Tiktaalik, that moved life out of the sea onto land! Go buddy!

Yesterday, scientists at the University of Chicago announced a study soon be formally published, proving that the itty bitty fins of the African lungfish even in today’s living species locomote in ways suggesting that the earliest animal footprint fossils could actually be from their ancestors.

And not – as until now widely presumed – from tetrapods like good ole “Tik”. Tetrapods, lungfish and another class of prehistoric sea-living creatures called coelacanths, were all candidates for the Mom that finally pushed babe out of the water, but until now the consensus was that the early lungfish were sort of dead-enders in that evolutionary contest, getting no further advanced really than those we see today in Africa. And that fully land-based walking creatures evolved from their cousins, the tetrapods.

So who cares?

Well, I do, because lungfish are still really neat living creatures many people see on safari, and because I think it helps illustrate evolution if you’re cautious. Like primates such as gorillas and baboons, it crushes in real time the theory underpinning creationists that evolution is unilinear.

“You think you’re related to that chimp?”

Well of course we didn’t come from that chimp, any more than walking creatures today were progeny of the lungfish. The chimp and humans, and the lungfish and all land walking creatures, had a common ancestor, but they diverged long ago and evolved quite differently into a host of varied creatures.

Nevertheless, it is the real time experience of common traits in our “ancient cousins” that demonstrates common ancestors existed in the first place! Long before DNA and other complex tools, all scientists had to work with was this kind of observed anatomy, and it wasn’t so bad. It produced a pretty good foundation for understanding natural selection.

But since Darwin’s and Wallace’s first explanations of natural selection, it has been massively misunderstood.

To me pointing out a chimp — or a lungfish — harnesses anyone’s intuition that there is something in common with us (man) – or anything that walks. It’s impossible to deny. And once that common understanding is reached, we can then contrast the massive differences that are equally intuitive. And the explanation for those massive differences is species divergence over long periods of time.

Unfortunately, there are no tetrapods still around, so until now I was stretching it suggesting that my dear icky slimy lungfish, squirming about in a drying up pool of mud, was demonstrating the emergence of terrestrialness.

No more! Thanks you brilliant guys in Chicago!

The Evolution of Republicans

The Evolution of Republicans

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

By the Philadelphia Inquirer's Tony Auth.
Sometimes I wish American politics would just hang clear of my Africa, but how naive I guess. Evolution is founded in, based in, spectacular in Africa, and it’s increasingly a hot-button issue in current Republican politics. I’m embarrassed to write about this, but the amount of ignorance among potentially very powerful people is flabbergasting and increasingly terrifying.

Herbert Cain hasn’t said, and that’s the point. He’s going to have to, soon. He can’t maintain his lead without addressing these issues which are part and parcel to the beliefs of those who will choose the candidate.

And by the way, Cain has a few other problems at the moment.

Jon Huntsman is the only major Republican candidate to embrace evolution. “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming.” Jon Huntsman is also the only major Republic candidate without a chance of winning.

Mitt Romney accepts evolution as science. But his mission to stay afloat in the hurricane season in the Bermuda triangle forces him into multitudes of qualification. “God created the universe” and evolution “created the human body.”

Detailing exactly what he believes would probably wreck his campaign.

Only Newt Gingrich can out hedge Romney. When asked specifically about evolution, he angled his response, “I believe that creation as an act of faith is true, and I believe that science as a mechanical process is true,” Gingrich told reporters in May. “Both can be true.”

And have absolutely nothing to do with one another or evolution.

Rick Perry concedes that “evolution is a theory” but “with gaps in it.” No, there aren’t his kind of gaps in it, but more important, he pulls no punches in terms of what he’ll do if he can: “I am a firm believer [that] intelligent design … should be presented in schools. “

He’s been successful in Texas, where intelligent design has been incorporated into middle school text books and evolution qualified. It’s a huge and horrible story in itself.

Michele Bachmann “supports intelligent design,” and supports it by lying, “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.”

Well, of course that’s not true, as is the case with much that Bachmann says day after day as though it’s gospel. (Maybe that’s the problem with her followers: they make up gospel.)

Unequivocally as his best credential Ron Paul states, “There is a theory… of evolution, and I don’t accept it,” Paul said.

Then there’s the bottom of the evolutionary chain, the last link so to speak. Rick Santorum makes the ridiculously untrue, not-even-a-metaphor pandering parallel that belief in evolution means you “are a descendant of a monkey,” and goes on to insist this nonsense is just one of “the many other liberal beliefs [of] Democrats.”

As a Senator from Pennsylvania he proposed the “Santorum Amendment” to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act that would have forced public schools to offer the creationist perspective in science classes, and to call into question the scientific evidence supporting evolution. That amendment was rejected.

That’s what we got to work with. One reasonable man without a hope who isn’t really a Republican, one man hiding on the run, two ducking and three wackos.

The candidates are driven by the right-wing Christian media, particularly talk radio. And the last few weeks have taken the ridiculous into the abstract sublime. You just won’t believe what right-wing talk radio is discussing these last few weeks with regards to evolution.

The current evolution topic is whether Darwin’s theories of natural selection contributed to Hitler’s Nazi holocaust.

Say what?

And so, therefore, Hitler was not a Christian.

Of course.

I know it’s unbelievable. I actually felt it was better to just not to wade into this, because the threads of logic were so knotted up.

“Nazism was not science-based,” Univ. of Minnesota biologist PZ Myers wrote last week, “Hitler was a true Christian.”

Somehow, whether Hitler was a Christian depends upon whether Christians believe in evolution, but evolution is science and if they don’t, then they aren’t Nazis, either? This is the new litmus test for Republican candidates. Can you phrase it better than me?

This ridiculous dispute became so prominent lately that University of Chicago professor Robert Richards issued a White Paper, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?“ with 45 pages of careful history, heavily annotated, in order to conclude “The only reasonable answer to the question that gives this essay its title is a very loud and unequivocal No!”

And Monday, the respected Philadelphia science journalist, Faye Flam, wrote that serious historians today “agree that any whiff of Darwinism in Hitler’s speech or writing was merely window-dressing.”

But we all know in today’s world that facts and logic don’t mean very much, so why try? We try, because it keeps us sane.

I just hope the election will fall however marginally with the sane.

Back to Life Time!

Back to Life Time!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Photo by John Sullivan in the Maasai Mara
Rains in Africa bring rebirth unlike anywhere else on earth. I don’t mean things just start to grow again. I mean dead things come back to life!

Admittedly, most of these creatures are just fooling us to believe they’ve returned from the dark side. They aren’t really the same thing, but the children of things that died when the rains last ended. But there are a few true miracle creatures that defy all sorts of normal zoological physiologies.

They’re called “mudfish” and … well, for obvious reasons. See the main picture above, although that was taken at the end rather than beginning of the rains. It’s easier to find them like this, captured in wiggling pods as they tried to avoid the marabou stork’s gullet, but before they’ve hibernated for the dry season.

The narrow picture to the right is one of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s several priceless ancient African sculptures praising mudfish. This one is titled, “Rattle Staff: Hand Holding Mudfish (Ukhurhe)” and can be found in gallery 352. And it’s now — at this time of the year — that they reemerge.

They’re an important but small family of earth’s creatures widely referred to as lungfish. Up to 6′ long, they’re mean predators: They can bite off your finger. They breathe with lungs, not gills. They can walk on land. They’ve been on earth for 100 million years and are the direct descendents of the 450 million year old fossil creatures that first walked fish out of the sea.

AND they can live 100 years BUT they regularly die just as many years as they live.

Say what?

At the end of every dry season, they wallow as in the picture above, frantically trying to discourage predators as their home evaporates. Then one night, they wrap themselves in a self-made mucous cocoon and become desiccated with the mud. Almost all their bodily functions cease.

Unlike bears or caterpillars changing or a 17-year grubbly little cicada in a shell under my oak tree, these creatures actually come to a near complete halt.

Until the rains return.

Those of us who know where to look after the first big rains … we’ll find them! They don’t emerge necessarily altogether like they are above. Usually the water has to be a bit deeper to break their hard cocoon and release them, and at that point they’re wholly under water.

A whole bunch of things in Africa actually behaves like mudfish: Toads, true frogs, salamanders, and dozens of insects and smaller carp-like fish are born, live their cycle, mate and die in a single pool of water.

That’s the difference: those creatures die leaving eggs to carry on their species. But mudfish don’t die, exactly. They, well, come back!

This rebirthing quality gave mudfish a divine character with early Africans. Particularly in the more developed early west African societies mudfish was often considered sacred and often the guardian or guide for a royal personage from this world to the next.

In Benin it was associated with Oba, the king, who had achieved the power of life and death of his subjects because of his divine association with the mudfish. In later more modern times, mudfish were prayed to, and petitioned especially for acts of healing.

In the northern west we often chastise equatorial and sunbird people for not appreciating the “change of seasons.” Well, there’s no snow on the equator, but in the wildernesses still preserved where dams, irrigation and boreholes have not disrupted the normal seasons of rain, change here can be much more dramatic than a leaf turning red.

The meaning of water falling from the sky is much more profound. Things come back to life!

The Absolutely Phenomenal Rat!

The Absolutely Phenomenal Rat!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Porcupines are common in East Africa, but more often we thought we saw only smaller ones that we presumed were juveniles, even though they always seemed to be alone. On closer inspection, they turned out not to be porkies, but giant crested rats! This week we learned how fascinating this creature is!

A famous East African scientist published a few days ago the remarkable story of this little creature, putting it on a pedestal of evolution well above many other animals.

I often explain on safari that if you reduce all goals in life to one, it’s defense – how to survive all the external efforts to destroy you. Africa has an amazing array of animal defenses from the sheer savageness of the honey badger to the heavy coat of the waterbuck that tastes so bad no one wants to get near it.

But this little creature, Lophiomys imhausi, has a defense that tops most others. Even at the first level, that its predators appear to get sick just looking at, scientists had trouble figuring out what was going on. But then, like the waterbuck, it was discovered that the creature’s hair was toxic to most of its predators.

The waterbuck secretes a musky oil. At first that’s what everyone thought the crested rat was doing, too, but it wasn’t. Its story is a remarkable lesson in extraordinary convergent evolution!

Little Porky chews a poisonous bark (that somehow doesn’t effect him), his saliva somehow reduces the soup in his mouth into a powerful poison, then he licks it onto his back.

And his back – those otherwise nondescript “crested hairs” – are made in such a unique way that they are specifically designed to absorb this specific concentrated poison.

And – critical to it being a successful radiated defense in natural selection – the poison doesn’t usually kill, just makes the predator very, very sick. So the predator not only won’t go near it, again, but can transmit this learned caution to siblings and offspring.

Imagine this. There were separate, ultimately converging evolutionary tracks: first, the ridiculously otherwise useless evolution of the hair structure; second, chewing of a plant but not for food so a craving by the creature to imaginatively but only partly consume something; third, (and I think most remarkably), the evolution of a poison in a plant where the creature lived that was just the right molecular structure that it wouldn’t kill but make very sick this creature’s predator; and fourth, the creature’s digestive system evolved to be immune to the poison in sync with its not wholly consuming it.

Wow. And there are probably many more lesser obvious biological evolutionary processes at work, too.

Consider that all these developments happened independent of one another, and essentially by chance. The only way any of this is comprehensible is to grasp the sense of time given this creature and its antecedents to create themselves.

That’s to me the greatest marvel of evolution: the backwards understanding of the length of time needed to let all these chances happen.

Of course there are evolutionary processes more complicated than this: what we call “malaria” is actually a sequential interaction of metamorphosing creatures (sort of caterpillar to butterfly types of life forms) that perfectly disrupt and destroy metabolic processes in humans.

But the crested rat is right out there to see! And in the panoply of seeable animals, this is pretty swift stuff!

I always knew not to mess with porky, so I never messed with Little Porky either (Jonathan’s petting not known), but I always presumed it was for the same reason: spines like the porkies. At a distance when light is shined on it (it’s a nocturnal creature), its crested back hairs erect just like porkies do.

But up close, which I’ve been able to do only once, the similarities are lost. They’re really hairs, not spines, and the overall creature is smaller. A porcupine can be 3 or 4 times larger when puffed up in defense.

Yet they both act the same way! Confronted, they turn towards you and raise those weapons on their back!

This amazing puzzle has been brought to us thanks to a famous scientists whose life has been dedicated to East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon. His library of books on Africa biology is large and includes field guides that guides like me have been using for years.

Kingdon told journalists that he kept crested rats as pets when he was a child growing up in East Africa. Finally, he decided, he had to figure out this incessant licking it always did, and simultaneously, why dogs that might see his pet would back away in horror, sometimes foaming up with saliva.

Now we know. One more little but absolutely amazing puzzle of life solved!

And thanks, too, for friend and client Mike Samars, for pointing me to this story.