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Smart dogs and smart owners usually go together 

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I think I may have actually tried this - or something similar - once. I was pretty drunk.

Today's Critter

Pigeon gymnastics

On Losing The Bugs

I'm a gadget freak. I especially love tech that marries two or more disparate things to synthesize something new.

What I don't particularly like is when the nerds (god love 'em) start thinking we can actually come up with some new technology in literally a few decades that can replace what Mother Earth has given us over literally millions of millennia.

So while I'm not willing to dismiss all of this as wishful thinking - I actually wish the nerds every success - I won't stop thinking we'd best be addressing the problems of over-population and fouling the nest more directly - and very rapidly.

Wired:

What Will Replace Insects When They're Gone?

The collapse of the insect population could unravel ecosystems. Scientists wonder if robots and drones could stop the gap.

WHAT, THOUGH, IF we don’t act quickly enough? If the fall of insects’ tiny empires causes whole ecosystems to unravel, toppling previously solid certainties about the way our world functions, what then?

It’s easy to foresee how diminishing supplies of certain foods and crashing wildlife populations will heap cascading suffering on the poor and vulnerable, given the lopsided nature of societies, and perhaps even stoke embers of resentment and nationalism as foundational resources become scarcer. It’s also reasonable to anticipate that we will reflexively grasp for a technological fix to the mess we’ve created.

Expectation is already being ladled upon projects, still in their infancy, to create genetically modified pollinators resistant to disease and chemicals or to fashion machines topped with tiny cannons that fire pollen at plants and therefore address some of the causes of the climate collapse. Other scientists have turned their ingenuity to replicating the form and function of winged insects—​researchers at Harvard University have devised diminutive robots that can swim before exploding out of the water into flight, using soft artificial muscles to harmlessly bounce off walls and other obstacles. Counterparts in the Netherlands have taken inspiration from the humble fruit fly, re-​creating the motion of their rapid wing beats in a robot with wings made of mylar, the material used in space blankets. The Delft University of Technology’s DelFly can hover, flip 360 degrees around pitch and roll axes, and accelerate to the speed of a human sprint within a few seconds.

Matej Karásek, a researcher working on the project, says he’s long been fascinated by the agility and spatial awareness of insects, even before he started working on the DelFly. “Whenever I walk outdoors and I see an insect I think ‘how are they able to do this?’ ” he says. Karásek’s robots aren’t an exact substitute for a fly or bee—​for one thing they have a 33-​centimeter (13-​inch) wingspan, making them 55 times the size of a fruit fly—​and the conundrum of carrying large pollen payloads without losing maneuverability means they aren’t quite ready to hum alongside the real thing. But there is confidence that day will arrive, drawn from the certainty many of us have that technology will eventually solve all of society’s intractable ills.

Perhaps the answer will be an army of larger hexacopter-​like drones, such as the fleet operated by US company Dropcopter, which autonomously pollinated an orchard of apples in New York for the first time in 2018. Or maybe the answer is a sophisticated robotic arm, which, using cameras, wheels, and artificial intelligence, can locate and hand-​pollinate plants without getting tired or bored like human workers. The US Department of Agriculture is funding one such effort, which, according to one of its leading experts, Manoj Karkee of Washington State University, promises to be a “genuine replacement for the natural pollination process” and is even “expected to be as effective or even more effective than natural pollinators like bees.”

Entomologists are instinctively disdainful of any suggestion that pollinating insects could somehow be matched by technology, even on a basic logistical level. Biologist Dave Goulson points out that bees are rather adept at pollinating flowers, given they’ve been honing their skills for around 120 million years, and that, besides, there are around 80 million honeybee hives in the world, each stuffed with tens of thousands of bees feeding and breeding for free. “What would the cost be of replacing them with robots?” Goulson asks. “It is remarkable hubris to think that we can improve on that.” To be fair to those devoted to appropriating the characteristics of insects for our use, there is widespread awe at the evolutionary brilliance of flies and bees and scant joy at the crisis that has brought us to the point where the meanderings of academic curiosity are being seized upon as possible salvation from our degenerate ways. When we consider technological solutions, we should perhaps spend less time judging the supply and more time judging the reasons why there’s demand in the first place.

Still, a less abusive association with insects will have to include some new ideas. If we are to intensively farm smaller areas in order to surrender space to the wilds, the advance of vertical farming, with year-​round crops stacked in warehouses and shipping containers using LED lighting and hydroponics instead of soils and pesticides will potentially work well teamed with robotic pollinators if the original insect version demurs from the task.

Western societies may also have to grapple with the counterintuitive concept of eating insects as a way of saving them. The vast tracts of land we’ve turned into biodiversity deserts are in many cases not even directly feeding people—​a third of all viable cropland is used to produce feed for livestock, which themselves take up a quarter of the planet’s ice-​free habitat. Mealworms and crickets, both excellent sources of protein that can multiply to enormous numbers in tight spaces, are a less destructive alternative to traditional Western diets and would help ease agricultural-​driven pressures that blight insects, such as climate change, chemical use, and land degradation. “There are far fewer environmental problems when you eat insects. They are also delicious,” says Arnold van Huis, a Dutch entomologist who has dined on 20 species of insects, his favorites being roasted termites and locusts, deep-fried and served with chili.

One day, perhaps robot bees could help prop up our food supply, and a revolution in the way we eat could help slow the accelerating ruination of the world’s glorious archive of life. But our measures of success in averting the insect crisis should be set a little higher than that. After all, we aren’t going to witness the last insect blink out, as we will with the final northern white rhinoceros or Bengal tiger. Whatever further cruelties we inflict, there will always be insects somewhere, crawling on a windowsill plant box in Chicago, nibbling at the edge of a rice paddy in Vietnam, scurrying away from flames licking at gum trees in Australia.

The tragedy will be how impoverished we will become, environmentally, spiritually, morally. Bumblebees, it has been discovered, can be taught to play football, will give up sleep to care for their hive’s young, and can remember good and bad experiences, hinting at a form of consciousness. The violin beetle is remarkably shaped, as the name suggests, like a violin, and side-​on is almost invisibly flat. The monarch butterfly is beautiful and can taste nectar through its feet. We won’t lose every single thing, but that is of scant consolation when such marvels are being ripped away. “The future is a very simplified global biota,” says entomologist David Wagner. “We will have bugs, but we will lose the big gaudy things. Our children will have a diminished world. That’s what we are giving them.”

A penurious existence, one where the marrow of life has been sucked from the bones of our surroundings, of a becalmed countryside save for the machines eking food from the remaining soils, may be one of the better scenarios facing us if the crashing of insects’ tiny empires isn’t heeded. The latest research shows that the loss of bees is already starting to limit the supply of key food crops, such as apples, blueberries, and cherries. Insect-​eating birds are now declining not only in the featureless fields of France but even in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest. Many insect populations around the world are falling by 1 to 2 percent a year, Wagner and colleagues confirmed recently, a trend he describes as “frightening.” It can, and almost certainly will, get worse. This catastrophe will plunge to some sort of nadir, although we do not appear to be close to that point yet. We’re still on the downward slope, to somewhere.

Today's Tweet

Cat: "Hey, so you know how sometimes... I bring home birds?" pic.twitter.com/Q9vUiJt95L

— Joe Zimmerman (@joezimmerman) February 10, 2022

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The instincts are there - needs a little work on the execution.

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Critters

“Thank you, humans”

“Bye” 👋 pic.twitter.com/yTeuST3KEt

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) January 17, 2022

Today's Reddit

Close encounter of the dinosaur kind

Today's Reddit

Mutation-n-selection is a wondrous thing.

Today's Reddit

Little horses can be such jerks.

Today's GIF

Don't mind me - just checkin' out the smörgåsbord

Today's Tweet

Dinosaur

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS SHIT IS A REAL ANIMAL pic.twitter.com/biQONosLW7

— Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) October 17, 2021

The Dying Of The Light

Ivory Billed Woodpecker

This story is being splashed across every media outlet everywhere, and still it's generating practically no real heat or light, or even much of a ripple.

Two important things:

1. As the greenies and the tree-huggers have been trying to get us to understand, it's not just the fact of losing the critters themselves - it's the fact that losing those critters at an accelerating pace means we're pulling forward the timeline for when we'll be facing the same fate as they are now.
2. It's even more imperative now to realize that the assholes who're benefitting from degrading our world are quietly facilitating the demise of those critters as a means to eliminate "government interference" as they pursue shareholder equity and a nice fat quarterly performance bonus.

WaPo: (pay wall)

The “Lord God Bird” is dead.

The ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghostly bird whose long-rumored survival in the bottomland swamps of the South has haunted seekers for generations, will be officially declared extinct by U.S. officials after years of futile efforts to save it. It earned its nickname because it was so big and so beautiful that those blessed to spot it blurted out the Lord’s name.

Even the scientist who wrote the obit cried.

“This is not an easy thing,” said Amy Trahan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who reviewed the evidence and wrote the report concluding that the ivory bill “no longer exists.”

“Nobody wants to be a part of that,” she added, choking up in a Zoom interview. “Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me a while.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal Wednesday to take 23 animals and plants off the endangered species list — because none can be found in the wild — exposes what scientists say is an accelerating rate of extinction worldwide. A million plants and animals are in danger of disappearing, many within decades. The newly extinct species are the casualties of climate change and habitat destruction, dying out sooner than any new protections can save them.

The species pushed over the brink include 10 types of birds and bats found only on Pacific islands, as well as eight types of freshwater mussels that once inhabited riverbeds from Illinois to Georgia. The best available science suggests these creatures are no longer swimming, scampering or soaring on this planet, obliterating the need for any federal protection.

In the nearly half-century since the Endangered Species Act came into force, only 11 other species have ever been delisted because they disappeared.

With a range that once spanned from the coastal plains of North Carolina to the bayous of East Texas, the ivory-billed woodpecker suffered its most precipitous drop in numbers during the 1800s. Marksmen gunned them down for private collectors and hat makers, while loggers felled the old-growth stands where the birds roosted and foraged for grub.

“The fact that this bird is so critically endangered has been true since the 1890s, and it’s fundamentally a consequence of the fact that we cut down every last trace of the virgin forest of the Southeastern U.S.,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We took all that away.”

But occasional sightings sustained hope for recovery. Teddy Roosevelt spotted three in 1907 during a bear hunt in Louisiana’s swamplands. In 1924, famed Cornell University ornithologist Arthur “Doc” Allen took the world’s first photograph of the ivory bill in Florida — just days before two collectors shot the mating pair. A decade later, after the bird was believed to be extinct, Allen’s team returned to make the world’s only undisputed recording of its hornlike calls.

The ivory bill was one of the first animals recognized in the United States as facing extinction, and its decline helped spur Congress in 1973 to pass the Endangered Species Act. The law made it illegal to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” imperiled species and sought to protect their habitats.

The law’s proponents point out that the vast majority of species under its protection — 99 percent — have not gone extinct. It has served as a model for other nations writing their own conservation legislation. Among the animals it is credited with saving are icons such as the bald eagle, brown pelican, gray wolf and American alligator.

But the newly confirmed extinctions show the limits of a law that, at nearly half a century old, came far too late for the ivory bill and other animals. And the act is under attack from many conservatives who call it ineffective, pointing out that only about 3 percent of the species listed for protection ever recover.

Jonathan Wood, a vice president of the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market environmental think tank, said the law punishes property owners who have endangered creatures on their lands by preventing farming and building.

“We should instead be rewarding landowners,” Wood said, by better compensating them for maintaining vulnerable wildlife on their land.

In some cases, critics contend, species get costly protections they don’t really need. Last month, federal wildlife officials announced that the snail darter, a tiny fish first found in the Tennessee River system, had recovered after being transplanted and found in the wild elsewhere.

“It is good the snail darter is off the endangered list, but, unfortunately, the agency continues a tradition of claiming ‘recoveries’ that are in part or even entirely a result of data error,” said Rob Gordon, who worked on endangered species as a Republican staffer on the House Natural Resources Committee.

Heeding these critics’ calls, the Trump administration worked to overhaul the law, making it easier to remove protections for threatened species and allowing wildlife managers to consider the economic cost of conserving an animal when weighing new protections.

The Biden administration moved in June to reverse those policies. And the president has vowed to set aside nearly a third of the nation’s land and water to protect wildlife, sequester carbon from the atmosphere and ensure that all Americans can access nature.

But even fenced-off ecosystems can’t be fully protected from a changing climate.

Throughout the rivers of the Southeast, for instance, freshwater mussels were once so plentiful that they were harvested to make buttons before the era of plastic. “We still sometimes find punched shells in the river,” said Tyler Hern, who now breeds them in captivity at Tennessee’s Erwin National Fish Hatchery to help restore their numbers.

Rivers once teeming with mussels — which clean streams by filtering them — have been transformed by industrial pollution, dam construction and rising water temperatures linked to climate change. The invertebrates often can’t escape.

“They’re capable of moving,” said Hern. “It’s just a matter of inches a day.”

For many mussels, their mating habits make them even more vulnerable. Males disperse their seed in the water for females downstream, who in turn spray their young at passing fish, so their babies can grow while attached to the fishes’ gills.

Any break in the long-distance affair could ruin a species.

The loss of animals is even more acute in Hawaii, often called the nation’s endangered species capital due to the sheer number of native plants and animals found nowhere else.

Among the eight Hawaiian birds officially declared extinct Wednesday are the prismatic Maui ’akepa and Moloka’i creeper and curve-beaked Kaua’i ʻakialoa and nukupu’u. Also gone is the Kaua’i ’o’o, whose haunting, flutelike mating call was last heard three decades ago.

The forest birds, like so many island-bound creatures, have succumbed to wave after wave of invasive species, including feral hogs that root up native seed-bearing plants and mosquitoes that spread an avian form of malaria. Rising temperatures allow disease-carrying mosquitoes to reach elevations once too cool for them to tolerate, going deeper into birds’ territories.

“Rats, cats, pigs are all problems. All those nonnative species are a problem. But I say mosquitoes are the worst of it,” said Eric VanderWerf, a former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who founded the nonprofit group Pacific Rim Conservation.

The campaign to save one bird, the po’ouli, a honeycreeper so unique it has its own genus, came too late. When only three were known on Maui in 2002, wildlife managers captured a female and brought it to a male’s territory. Uninterested, the female flew home.

In a last-ditch matchmaking effort, one of the forlorn males was netted for captive breeding. But a female could no longer be found. It died alone in 2004, and is now an item at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

Many other potentially endangered animals don’t get nearly as much attention. And wildlife advocates say that tight budgets at the two federal wildlife agencies — the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service — have complicated rescue efforts.

On average, species wait a dozen years to receive protection, with at least 47 vanishing while in regulatory purgatory.

The monarch butterfly, in steep decline across drought-plagued Western states, ranks as one of the highest-profile species stuck in limbo. Trump administration officials opted in December not to declare it endangered, citing scarce agency resources, even though they said protection is warranted.

“The Endangered Species Act is not failing,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, a former Fish and Wildlife Service director from 1997 to 2001 who now runs the Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation organization. “It’s starving.”

Biden officials asked a federal court in August to reject a lawsuit from wildlife advocates aiming to restore federal protections for the gray wolf, as states from Wisconsin to Idaho move to cull wolves that frustrated farmers by feeding on livestock. Yet weeks later, they announced they will consider whether the iconic predator should be listed again.

“There’s a lot of species that it’s politically costly to list, and then protect,” said Center for Biological Diversity scientist Tierra Curry.

The political will to find — and save — the ivory-billed woodpecker never flagged. Artistic works over the years, from John James Audubon’s painting in the 1820s to Sufjan Stevens’ modern indie folk song, have kept the bird in the national consciousness even as its numbers dwindled in the wild.

And then, in 2004, a kayaker spotted what he believed to be an ivory bill in Arkansas. Swarms of scientists, including Cornell’s Fitzpatrick, descended on that cypress swamp, recording at least six other sightings.

But some other ornithologists pushed back. Video footage of the bird was too grainy to reach a definitive conclusion. It could have been a related species, the pileated woodpecker. Subsequent searches came up short. There was a silver lining, though, as Americans scrambled to restore the woods their ancestors had decimated.

“We’ve had so much land acquisition and reforestation occur, just because of those sightings,” said Trahan, the Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.

Even with the official extinction declaration from the federal government, Fitzpatrick doesn’t want to call it quits. He warned that without Endangered Species Act protection, it is legal to kill it if someone manages to discover it again. The public has 60 days to comment on the extinction declarations before they are finalized.

“I’m not ready to call it extinct,” he said. “It’s looking bad, but it’s been looking bad for 60 years.”

Always remember:

We're not just talking about how our babies and grandbabies will live.

We're talking about how those babies and grandbabies will die.

Today's Reddit

Fun with buzzy sting-y murder thingies that make delicious gooey stuff with their puke.

Today's Critters

What I wish every public freakout could really be like 

 

A Peacock

Missed This One

From three years ago.

Smithsonian Magazine:

About 115,000 years ago in what is now present-day Poland, a large bird ate a child. As Laura Geggel at LiveScience reports, it’s not known whether the bird killed the Neanderthal child or happened upon its body and scavenged its remains, but two tiny finger bones found by paleontologists tell a gruesome tale, all the same.

The two phalanges, each about one-third of an inch long, were found several years ago in Ciemna Cave (also known as Ojcow Cave) along with an assortment of animal bones. When researchers took a closer look at the cache they realized two things: that those two digits came from a hominin species and that the bones were dotted with holes. “Analyses show that this is the result of passing through the digestive system of a large bird,” Paweł Valde-Nowak from the Institute of Archeology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków says in a press release. “This is the first such known example from the Ice Age.”

The bones are too deteriorated to perform DNA tests on, but the researchers say they are certain that the digits come from a Neanderthal youth between the ages of 5 and 7, and their work will be detailed later this year in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology. “[We] have no doubts that these are Neanderthal remains, because they come from a very deep layer of the cave, a few meters below the present surface,” Valde-Nowak says. “This layer also contains typical stone tools used by the Neanderthal.”

It’s not clear how the bones ended up in the cave and whether Neanderthals put them there or if they were deposited by the bird. It’s possible that the Neanderthals only used the cave seasonally and wild animals used it the rest of the year.

Prior to this find, the oldest known remains of human ancestors or relatives in Poland were three Neanderthal molars dating to 52,000 to 42,000 years ago. According to Valde-Nowak, Neanderthals likely first appeared in Poland—and in Eurasia as a whole—some 300,000 years ago.

The lingering question, however, is what kind of bird could attack and eat a human child? The researchers don’t address the topic, but Sarah Sloat at Inverse reports that the fossil record shows other instances of hominin children becoming bird food. She reports that the remains of the Taung child, a 2.8 million-year-old Australopithecus africanus found in the Republic of South Africa in 1924 and reanalyzed in 2006 shows puncture marks below its eye sockets consistent with eagle talons. In fact, today's African crowned eagle is known to prey on large monkeys that weigh about the same as a human child. Typically, the birds kill their quarry on the spot, only taking bits and pieces back to the nest. If a similar eagle killed the Neanderthal child, that would certainly explain why only two small finger bones were found together.

When you dig into it, there’s actually somewhat of a rich history of avian hunters gobbling up children. Just a few years ago, researchers found evidence that the Maori legend of Te Hokioi, a giant eagle that snatched children, was likely based on a real species as well. CT scans of the bones of the large Haast eagle, which went extinct in New Zealand about 500 years ago, showed that it was a predator, not a scavenger, and had talons strong enough to pierce a human pelvis.

Even today, there are occasional reports from Alaska of Thunderbirds—eagles the size of small airplanes—including one reported earlier this year, though there's no concrete evidence such a bird ever existed.

Bojutsu Bear

At the Hiroshima Zoo - practice practice practice

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Eagles are like leopards with wings.

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Check out this guy's Instagram - his handle is akshiloh

(Be sure to stay for the videos of Lovey the Moose)