The other 30% is a bitch

I am pleased to share the news with you that the world’s oceans are 70% shark free.

That’s according to the findings of an international team of scientists that postulates the absence of sharks from abyssal zones of the world’s oceans may mean some species are in danger of extinction. The abyssal zones are the ones that are in perpetual darkness at depths below 6,560 feet, and have phenomenal pressures that can be up to 10,000 pounds per square inch!

The findings were published in the “Proceedings of The Royal Society, Biological Series.” Among conclusions: sharks may be having more difficult times than ever finding food.

Monty Priede, director of Oceanlab at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told United Press International:

“Sharks are already threatened worldwide by the intensity of fishing activity, but our finding suggests they may be more vulnerable to over-exploitation than was previously thought.”

I’m sure that’s of some comfort to all those people we hear about who are victims of shark attacks.

Doppler, hell, he’s got spleen

Paul Smokov, a North Dakota cattle farmer, doesn’t bother with modern technology when it comes to forecasting the weather. He just checks pig spleens.

“It looks like a normal year with no major storms,” Smokov, 84, told an Associated Press reporter as he looked at a pair of the shiny, brown, foot-long organs on his kitchen counter.

Another school of thought presumes just seeing pigs wrapped in, say, a blanket — as seen here — might give you an idea that cold weather is a-coming.

Smokov, who learned his folk craft from his Ukranian forebears, says if the spleen is wide where it attaches to the pig’s stomach and then narrows, it means winter weather will come early with a mild spring. A narrow-to-wider spleen usually means harsh weather in the spring, he said. The spleens obtained by Smokov this year are pretty uniform in thickness, which means no drastic changes.

How accurate is he?

“The spleens are 85% correct, according to my figures,” he said. As for the weathermen, “Those guys aren’t any better.”

A meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Bismarck, ND, said the service’s three-month outloook is typically at least 60% percent accurate.

The day of the survivors

One of the two groups pictured here can be considered, on this day after Thanksgiving, the survivors. Which one depends on one’s point of view. My money is on the turkeys.

While humans in our shopaholic nation refer to the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday, in the turkey universe it’s Glorious Friday.

Yesterday was Black Thursday for thousands of them, so the ones still strutting around today and gorging themselves on food we’ve put out for much smaller examples of birddom are feeling pretty good to have survived for at least one more year.

The reason I do not see today’s bargain-intoxicated shoppers — some of whom were up since the wee hours waiting on line for those 4 and 5 a.m. door-opening bargains they probably didn’t need — as survivors is that many of them also will be out at the malls and big box stores on Black Saturday and Black Sunday repeating today’s consumer madness, even in the face of dire weather predictions for the weekend.

The turkeys, meanwhile, will be relaxing and eating berries and pumpkins seeds in relative comfort.

Turkeys are not birdbrains.

God save the turkeys

Which of these things is not like the other?

If you guessed the one in the feathered hat, you’re wrong. It’s the two animate objects, not the inanimate map, flocking together.

This occurred to me as I was watching the BBC News on cable TV tonight. I like the channel because the British Broadcasting Co. is head-and-shoulders above U.S. commercial and “public” television in providing a broad look at the news of the world and putting it in some kind of perspective with deep reporting and insightful analysis. Most of the time.

On this particular evening, the newscaster — a Brit based in Washington, D.C. — couldn’t restrain himself when it came to making fun of an American custom: the annual presidential pardon for a turkey just before Thanksgiving.

This year the freed bird will range down to Florida to, I am not making this up, serve as grand marshal for a Thanksgiving parade at DisneyWorld in Orlando.

The newscaster got his jollies over all this. I agree it’s a particularly stupid thing, and can’t imagine how it came about — unless it had something to do with a poultry industry PR gimmick.

But that doesn’t give a foreign guest to our shores license to poke fun at our current gallant leader and our favorite holiday food. England has some pretty odd customs, too, and most of them involve a certain Queen Elizabeth II. I don’t mean to be nasty, mind you, but it took her years to master The Royal Wave she uses at public gatherings. A parade grand marshal does the same thing, but the turkey didn’t need to be made ruler of a nation to do so.

Obviously, she doesn’t serve as much purpose as a tasty turkey and costs a lot more per pound.

Need proof? The turkey breast I bought this year cost $2.67 a pound. The queen, even after you take away all her freebie perks like rent and staff and travel and clothes and other goodies, is conservatively worth $3.2 million a pound.

NOTHING’S BUGGING ME

The ripped turf in my front lawn was a sure sign we had been visited in the night by skunks.

Every now and then they show up to dig for grubs, followed by the crows that like to check the damaged area in case the striped ones missed something.

Interesting that no mater how much care the lawn gets, we go through this process nearly every year. A sign of the season, one supposes.

What used to be another sign of the season — the presence of lots of bugs — once again was scarce this summer and fall. In particular, Lightning Bugs, a/k/a Fireflies, are in extremely short supply. Not like the days of childhood when every kid under the age of 13 was able to fill an old jelly jar with them, thus creating an impromptu summer evening lantern until they let their prey loose when bedtime came.

Add their lower numbers to the worldwide dropoff in the number of bees and I’m beginning to be concerned. Pesky or otherwise, bugs have their place in the order of things.

I can’t even remember the last time I saw a member of the Beetle Order, Lampyridae Family. Maybe it’s a population control thing among such bugs. After all, the only reason the males flash their taillights is to try to attract mates, and when a female sees a flash she likes she flashes him right back.

One or the other bug genders probably is getting standoffish in this era of unsafe sex.

A DIP IN THE GENE POOL

We’ve all slowed down to gawk at traffic accidents. I suspect the same shared experience occurs with cable TV. Some things are so bizarre you can’t help staring.

Take the judge shows. Most deal with squabbles over cell phone bills, apartment rent and pets on the loose — unless, of course, they deal with paternity issues. That seems to be the No. 1 category when I happen upon such shows and can’t tear myself away from the spectacle.

Listening to the usually undereducated, poorly spoken and selfishly “entitled” combatants trying to convince a TV judge to rule in their favor makes me fear for the human gene pool. If this is what keeps reproducing, we’re in big trouble.

However, there is some hope on the horizon for a better gene pool from another species — apes. A team of researchers from the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta says they have compiled conclusive evidence that apes communicate using gestures. In fact, say the researchers, those they observed use both hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood.

Meaning what? Just that they cite these findings as support for the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

Although all primates use vocal and facial expressions to communicate, only the great apes — gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos — use gestures as well, an ability they share with humans. When they make gestures, they use their right hand, which is controlled by the left side of the brain, the same side that is the as the human language control center.

Now, if we can just get some of these TV courtroom bozos to observe the bonobos and learn a thing or two about communication, humanity may live a bit longer.

The plight of the bumblebee

I suppose, given the fresh coverlet of snow that fell late yesterday, it is unseasonable to think about bees. But, I am thinking about both the birds and the bees of late, and not at all in the amorous sense.

The birds continue flocking (no pun intended if one was detected there) to the feeders in the crabapple tree outside my kitchen window. All sorts of birds.

Bees apparently will be a different story if the mystery malady that is making entire hives of them disappear in our area continues. It’s getting difficult not to be aware of the problem since it’s being reported all over, such as in Illinois, Maine and about 20 other states.

This also apparently has been going on for several years in Spain where a mysterious disease has wiped out 40% of that country’s bee population. The same thing is happening in Canada’s New Brunswick Province where 45% of the hives have been depopulated. And in New Zealand, where everyone is all abuzz about the missing bees, it is suspected that some sort of varroa bee mite might be killing off the honeymakers.

Anyway, I find the bee thing particularly troubling because back in July 2005 I wrote about the scarcity of such summer bugs as mosquitos and lightning bugs, a/k/a fireflies, a shortage I haven’t seen being alleviated by man or nature since then.

Like the canaries in the coal mine that once were used as a toxic gas early warning system for miners, the missing insects might be showing us something scary by not showing up at all.

DELIVERY FOR MR. NAKAMORA

Japanese whalers are projected to kill 935 minke whales in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary during the first four months of 2006.

Why? (A) To use the carcasses for scientific purposes. (B) Because they can.

Battles between Japanese whalers and anti-hunting factions have raged for years. When the International Whaling Commission imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, the Japanese complied — until 1987.

The latest “anti” blow was struck when the 56-foot-long carcass of a fin whale that got stuck and died in the shallow waters of the Baltic Sea was dropped on the doorstep of the Japanese embassy in Berlin. It was accompanied by a banner (seen here). Considering it was a protest against Japan delivered in Germany, would it be a stretch to say using a sign written in English was aiming the message at a certain audience?

The Greenpeace activists said they were trying to show that killing whales is unnecessary because cadavers can always be found. They and others also dispute the claim of whaling for scientific purposes since much of the whale meat winds up in Japanese restaurants.

The Greenpeace faction may be staying indoors today since the Berlin weather forecast for tomorrow is for showers and a high of just 36°.

THE CATS & THE HISTORIANS

I have often commented, not ad nausem I hope, on the doings of The Other Beings cohabitating with me up here on Weathering Heights.

They are The Large Cat and The Larger Cat, denizens of our cozy living space and bringers of entertainment and contentment which they trade for tasty tidbits, strings to chase and frequent grooming sessions.

We have always suspected they come from a lineage even longer than we knew to be the case — domesticated cats being traced back to at least the pharonic dynasties of ancient Egypt. We’ve even viewed a cat mummy ensconced in the Albany (N.Y.) Institute of History and Art.

Now comes word that modern cats have their roots in Asia 11 million years ago, according to a DNA study of wild and domestic cats reported on by the BBC.

The ancient ancestors of the 37 species alive today, say the scientists in the report, migrated across the globe, eventually settling in all continents except Antarctica. They merged into eight major lineages such as lions, ocelots and domestic cats.

How did they get up here on Weathering Heights, I wondered? Other than the obvious, of course, that being when we adopted them from a cat shelter.

Well, say the scientists, the common ancestors of modern cats crossed the Bering land bridge to North America about eight million years ago.

I doubt those cats would be impressed by the ones we know that can barely be troubled to move from puddle of sunshine to puddle of sunshine on a sunny afternoon.

PANDAMONIUM

The year 2005, it seems, was a boom year for panda growers.

The Chinese government reports that 21 of them survived early infancy and are thriving in the nation’s various zoos and breeding centers, bringing the captive population to 183 nationwide, with another 24 living in the U.S., Japan, Germany, Austria and Thailand.

“Despite the early deaths of a few baby pandas, 2005 has witnessed the largest number of surviving newborn pandas in China’s history of artificial fertilization on the rare species,” Na Chunfeng, an official with State Forestry Administration, was quoted as saying. The previous record was set in 2003, when 15 babies born in captivity survived.

The pandas of the world apparently are in better hands than the wallabies. The kangaroo-like Australian animals have been dying out, so captive breeding programs have been started and offspring from them sent to various nature preserves in Australia to help boost the numbers worldwide. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the numbers game was messed up when a worker at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo inadvertently put a toxic plant in the wallaby exhibit. Three of the animals died after ingesting the plant.

A RITUAL FOR THE BIRDS

The larger of The Other Beings that co-inhabit Weathering Heights with us isn’t given to sudden movements unless there is food involved. This morning was a different matter entirely.

What had struck a responsive chord at the very center of his feline being was the huge bluejay perched in the crabapple tree outside the kitchen window. The smaller finches, cardinals, wrens, woodpeckers, titmouses (titmice, titmeese? … I never can quite get it straight) and assorted wild birds that usually perch there awaiting their turn at the suet and mixed-seed cages had been temporarily spooked by big bird.

Whiskers standing straight out, tail twitching, that funny little mewling noise deep in the throat that beings of his persuasion often employ when contemplating winged potential food. Finally, I thought, he’s distracted from breakfast and ready to exercise his Creator’s design by making a mad dash at the window to scare off the cocky intruder.

Then, Lily, the smaller (but not by much) of The Other Beings, glided sleepily down the stairs from the loft where she’d spent the night on her comfy pillow bed, ready for breakfast and mewing at big orange Andre to join her at the dish.

That broke the magical spell and we all lapsed into the morning routine. A forkful of tuna for each of them, a bowl of fresh water, and then a bowl of crunchy stuff to keep their tummies satisfied and their teeth sparking clean.

There still was hope for them to pay attention to the world around them. Morning sunshine actually was spilling over Bald Mountain just behind Weathering Heights, the skies were clear, and the usual Canada geese, wild turkeys, cackling crows and other bully birds were nowhere in sight. The rainbow of smaller creatures would soon be twittering and scampering about in full view. All in all, a rather satisfying way to start the day.

DATA GETS SEAL OF APPROVAL

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, some hysterics claimed that 36 dolphins trained by the U.S. Navy to carry toxic-dart guns for military purposes had escaped in the confusion.

I kind of doubt that, but it’s a fun thing to contemplate. On a more realistic plane, elephant seals are being used to collect new information on conditions in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. They’re equipped with little computers stuck on their heads that flash data to scientists in Scotland via satellite when the animals surface to breath. It’s a fascinating story.

“These animals are opening an interesting new window on the ocean,” Mike Fedak told the BBC. He’s with the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), Gatty Marine Laboratory, University of St. Andrews. “They can go to places in the ocean that we very often can’t go to, and can sample parts of the ocean where we can’t afford to or logistically are not able to.”

Up here on Weathering Heights, our animals are less interested in plumbing the depths of their environment. The Other Beings who live indoors with us may go down to the basement occasionally, but they’re usually not providing much data except that their litter boxes need cleaning or their food bowls need filling. The outdoors wildlife, however, does tell us it’s been a mild winter because they’ve munched on far fewer of our ornamental shrubs and plants than usual. Of course, that only verifies what we already knew.