This year (June actually) marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the system of biological nomenclature. An excellent article by David Quammen on the man and his achievement (Quammen calls him the first "information architect") may be found in the June, 2007 National Geographic.
Without going into the detail so well described in the Geographic article, let me present, for your amusement, a couple of stories told me by a taxonomist and member of the Linnean Society.
It seems that Carl was either a) possessed of an extremely dry wit, or b) a cranky old fusspot. The Norway rat (actually from the steppes of central Asia) was named Rattus norvegicus by Linnaeus because, as a Swede, he despised Norwegians. He must really have had it in for Germans since the German cockroach (Blatella germanicus) is really from tropical west Africa.
Linnaeus named both the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Here we have one of the smallest of mammals and the largest creature who ever lived, both sharing a name. One wonders why...perhaps a joke? "Hey Sven, go get me a musculus"; leaving poor Sven to wonder if he needs a jar or a harpoon.
Linnaeus' legacy is the orderly system of naming living things (he tried it for minerals, but gave it up as way too complex). The foundation of the system is the genus and species. All living things must be named according to the rules set forth by the rules of nomenclature. Plants must be described in a scholarly journal in Latin, and a specimen, called the type specimen, must be deposited in an accredited institution. The type and associated description ultimately are what all members of that species are measured against when taxonomists try to determine what ever it is they may have in hand. The rules for animals are pretty much the same with the exceptions that the description need not be in Latin, and the type specimen may be a part or even a photograph of the animal. If you discover a new species, you get to name it. Linnaeus described and named us; Homo sapiens. Guess who he named as the type specimen? Himself. We are all held comparable to a middle-aged Swedish man. Go figure.
On to the Loch Ness Monster. In the 1970's, a plan was hatched to depth-charge Loch Ness in an effort to bring some closure (dead or alive) to the myth of the Loch Ness Monster. To thwart this, Sir Peter Scott (son of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, of Antarctic fame, and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund) and Robert Rimes co-published a paper in the journal Nature, describing the beast. They named it Nessiteras rhombopteryx (Greek for "the wonder of Ness with the diamond shaped fin"), "affinities uncertain". As a type specimen, the authors used a pair of blurry photos, purported to be of the Nessie, one showing what could be imagined as a squarish fin, the other just a blob. Under the rules of zoological nomenclature, the photos counted as a type specimen. Nessie was placed on the British list of endangered species and saved from a cruel fate. Some skeptics have noted Nessiteras rhombopteryx is an anagram for "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Robert Rines responded to these critics with his own anagram: "Yes, both pix are monsters, R."
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Plan B
"If we had a Plan B, it would have been Plan A"
--Unforgettable line from an unremembered movie
A catbird has claimed the overgrown corner of the yard by the swing set. A Chinese wisteria has been climbing the framework for a couple of years now, despite my best efforts to tame it. It has attracted hangers on as well, including a blackberry. The bramble attracted the catbird who drives off any other birds remotely in the area. Blackberries are among the early- to mid-summer ripening fruits that drive the birds nuts. When I say "ripen", I mean turn red. Red blackberries are to this palate, slightly sour and insipid. It's only when they become that deep purple-black with the intoxicating fruity aroma that I get interested. I used to eat myself sick on them when I was a kid. Little did I know that I was just part of Plan B for the plant to scatter its seeds.
Red fruits are hugely attractive to birds. Hence, cherries, dogwood, magnolia, and holly berries. These trees produce large numbers all at once and the birds swarm to them. I have seen a cherry, red fruits glowing in the woods like Christmas ornaments, filled with orioles, grackles, robins, and who knows what, all gorging together. Dogwood, magnolia, and holly, their berries loaded with high-energy lipids, ripen just in time for the south-bound migrants and I have seen the trees in my front yard striped in only a few short hours by hordes of robins and cedar waxwings.
Blackberries go a slightly different path; only a few berries ripen each day, keeping the catbird coming back for more, ensuring a steady customer. The catbird inspects all parts of the vine, looking for the telltale red berries. Finding one, it gobbles it down and keeps looking for more. In places where blackberries are abundant, like in the woods where I grew up (along the creek by the old leaky buried sewage line...who knew?), birds just can't keep up with the sheer poundage of fruit. This is where Plan B comes in. If the red berries are not eaten, they just keep ripening until they drop off the vine or a mammal, a raccoon, deer, opossum, or ten-year old kid, happens by. Purple, loaded with sugar and smelling vaguely like strawberries, they are definitely a come-hither treat. Enough of the seeds pass through the gut without being chewed (or stuck between molars) to ensure deposition some ways off. Even if the berries drop off the vine, they are sought out by box turtles who have a surprisingly sweet tooth (actually, they have no teeth at all, but you get the picture).
If you can find a trove of blackberries that the birds couldn't keep up with, and the turtles haven't beaten you to, pick a pint or so to take home (what you eat on the spot doesn't count), crush lightly to get the juices going and serve over vanilla ice cream. Better yet, pick two pints and freeze one for later; Summer in January never tasted so good.
--Unforgettable line from an unremembered movie
A catbird has claimed the overgrown corner of the yard by the swing set. A Chinese wisteria has been climbing the framework for a couple of years now, despite my best efforts to tame it. It has attracted hangers on as well, including a blackberry. The bramble attracted the catbird who drives off any other birds remotely in the area. Blackberries are among the early- to mid-summer ripening fruits that drive the birds nuts. When I say "ripen", I mean turn red. Red blackberries are to this palate, slightly sour and insipid. It's only when they become that deep purple-black with the intoxicating fruity aroma that I get interested. I used to eat myself sick on them when I was a kid. Little did I know that I was just part of Plan B for the plant to scatter its seeds.
Red fruits are hugely attractive to birds. Hence, cherries, dogwood, magnolia, and holly berries. These trees produce large numbers all at once and the birds swarm to them. I have seen a cherry, red fruits glowing in the woods like Christmas ornaments, filled with orioles, grackles, robins, and who knows what, all gorging together. Dogwood, magnolia, and holly, their berries loaded with high-energy lipids, ripen just in time for the south-bound migrants and I have seen the trees in my front yard striped in only a few short hours by hordes of robins and cedar waxwings.
Blackberries go a slightly different path; only a few berries ripen each day, keeping the catbird coming back for more, ensuring a steady customer. The catbird inspects all parts of the vine, looking for the telltale red berries. Finding one, it gobbles it down and keeps looking for more. In places where blackberries are abundant, like in the woods where I grew up (along the creek by the old leaky buried sewage line...who knew?), birds just can't keep up with the sheer poundage of fruit. This is where Plan B comes in. If the red berries are not eaten, they just keep ripening until they drop off the vine or a mammal, a raccoon, deer, opossum, or ten-year old kid, happens by. Purple, loaded with sugar and smelling vaguely like strawberries, they are definitely a come-hither treat. Enough of the seeds pass through the gut without being chewed (or stuck between molars) to ensure deposition some ways off. Even if the berries drop off the vine, they are sought out by box turtles who have a surprisingly sweet tooth (actually, they have no teeth at all, but you get the picture).
If you can find a trove of blackberries that the birds couldn't keep up with, and the turtles haven't beaten you to, pick a pint or so to take home (what you eat on the spot doesn't count), crush lightly to get the juices going and serve over vanilla ice cream. Better yet, pick two pints and freeze one for later; Summer in January never tasted so good.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The Eternal Dance
Every member of a prey species can take it as given that they will never die of old age. Something faster, more clever, or just luckier will find them first. Every gazelle knows, deep down in its DNA, that it needs to outrun the fastest cheetah it encounters today, and every cheetah knows it needs to outrun the slowest gazelle. The slow genes are remorselessly weeded out of the population, resulting in ever faster animals - predator and prey drive each other's evolution. Case in point, the American pronghorn. This elegant creature can hit speeds of close to 70 miles per hour, a leftover trait from 15,000 years ago when the American cheetah stalked the Great Plains. The cheetah is extinct (probably due to the advent of humans crossing the land bridge from Asia), but the pronghorn's speed abides.
Prey species have a whole bag of tricks to keep from becoming dinner. Fish school, birds flock, mammals herd. The idea is that a predator needs to pick out one individual to concentrate on in order to maximize success. Most predators make a kill only about one in ten tries at best. So, if you are bunched up and moving at top speed, the predator you are trying to avoid will lose you in the crowd. At least that's the theory. But predators have tricks up their proverbial sleeves as well. School of fish crowding into a tight ball so any individual is lost? Attack the whole ball like swordfish and marlin do. Lash about in a crowd and you are certain to hit something which can be eaten at leisure. Humpback whales go one better; they swim below the packed school of fish, and blow a stream of bubbles while circling the base. This "bubble net" serves to pack the school even more densely and the whale comes up from below, mouth open, to engulf the whole shebang.
I was beach combing at Bethany last fall when I saw a flock of sanderlings swirling up in a tight spiral. At first, I thought it was smoke until my eyes made out the individual birds. Sanderlings are those tiny sandpipers everyone sees at the beach but no one really notices. One of several related species of small sandpipers, known to birders as "peeps", they run up and down the beach, always staying just out of the wash of the surf. Running like clockwork toys, they examine each new swatch of wet sand for any tiny mole crab or other crustacean exposed by the receding wave. In fall, they form small flocks, some of which stay along the mid Atlantic, others travel to points south. The flock I was watching spiraled even tighter when a peregrine falcon appeared from out of nowhere. The sanderlings had seen it and recognized it for what it was and were taking the only defense they knew -keep moving, keep shifting. They seemingly moved in precise unison. Ornithologists originally thought flocking birds were telepathic by the way they seem to move as a single unit. Researchers, using high speed movies, were able to notice how one bird begins the move with the nearest neighbors mirroring it. The movement ripples across the flock too fast for the unaided human eye to see.
A peregrine can outfly any bird in the sky, so fleeing was not an option. The peregrine dove through the spiral, splitting it in two. The two smaller flocks, still spiralling, separated and the falcon dove through the smaller of the two. The birds veered as one and kept the tight spiral. All but one - too old keep up, too young to recognize the signals,or just plain out of luck. One sanderling found itself alone. The Japanese have a saying: "the lone nail gets hammered down". The falcon knew this and now had a single individual on which to concentrate. While the rest of the flock, knowing they were safe, sped down the beach, the lone peep, in a final defensive maneuver, dropped like a rock onto the water. The peregrine hovered over the hapless sanderling floating on the surface, and with all the grace and precision of a dinner party guest picking up a canape, plucked the peep from the surface and quenched it in one great yellow talon. The falcon flew up-beach to pluck and devour its meal. The sanderlings settled back down on the beach to continue their clockwork minuet with the waves, searching for tidbits.
Everybody eats. Everybody dances.
Prey species have a whole bag of tricks to keep from becoming dinner. Fish school, birds flock, mammals herd. The idea is that a predator needs to pick out one individual to concentrate on in order to maximize success. Most predators make a kill only about one in ten tries at best. So, if you are bunched up and moving at top speed, the predator you are trying to avoid will lose you in the crowd. At least that's the theory. But predators have tricks up their proverbial sleeves as well. School of fish crowding into a tight ball so any individual is lost? Attack the whole ball like swordfish and marlin do. Lash about in a crowd and you are certain to hit something which can be eaten at leisure. Humpback whales go one better; they swim below the packed school of fish, and blow a stream of bubbles while circling the base. This "bubble net" serves to pack the school even more densely and the whale comes up from below, mouth open, to engulf the whole shebang.
I was beach combing at Bethany last fall when I saw a flock of sanderlings swirling up in a tight spiral. At first, I thought it was smoke until my eyes made out the individual birds. Sanderlings are those tiny sandpipers everyone sees at the beach but no one really notices. One of several related species of small sandpipers, known to birders as "peeps", they run up and down the beach, always staying just out of the wash of the surf. Running like clockwork toys, they examine each new swatch of wet sand for any tiny mole crab or other crustacean exposed by the receding wave. In fall, they form small flocks, some of which stay along the mid Atlantic, others travel to points south. The flock I was watching spiraled even tighter when a peregrine falcon appeared from out of nowhere. The sanderlings had seen it and recognized it for what it was and were taking the only defense they knew -keep moving, keep shifting. They seemingly moved in precise unison. Ornithologists originally thought flocking birds were telepathic by the way they seem to move as a single unit. Researchers, using high speed movies, were able to notice how one bird begins the move with the nearest neighbors mirroring it. The movement ripples across the flock too fast for the unaided human eye to see.
A peregrine can outfly any bird in the sky, so fleeing was not an option. The peregrine dove through the spiral, splitting it in two. The two smaller flocks, still spiralling, separated and the falcon dove through the smaller of the two. The birds veered as one and kept the tight spiral. All but one - too old keep up, too young to recognize the signals,or just plain out of luck. One sanderling found itself alone. The Japanese have a saying: "the lone nail gets hammered down". The falcon knew this and now had a single individual on which to concentrate. While the rest of the flock, knowing they were safe, sped down the beach, the lone peep, in a final defensive maneuver, dropped like a rock onto the water. The peregrine hovered over the hapless sanderling floating on the surface, and with all the grace and precision of a dinner party guest picking up a canape, plucked the peep from the surface and quenched it in one great yellow talon. The falcon flew up-beach to pluck and devour its meal. The sanderlings settled back down on the beach to continue their clockwork minuet with the waves, searching for tidbits.
Everybody eats. Everybody dances.
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