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.

A HOT TIME IN THE COLD TOWN TONIGHT

Inside a car en route somewhere or other:

“Put the window up, I’m cold.”

“But then I’ll be too hot.”

“Then turn on the air-conditioner.”

“You say it makes you freeze to death.”

“It wasn’t like this when we were dating.”

“It sure wasn’t!”

What is it about the male/female dynamic after about age 17 when she begins to catch a chill from anything less than 80 degrees and he can’t breath unless frost is forming on all indoor surfaces?

That thought kept bobbing around as I was headed home after a lunch with a group of friends with whom I held “The Great Hot and Cold Debate.” Everyone had her or his own opinion, made fresh by our recent weather that gives us temperatures in the 70s one day and 50s the next, thereby messing up everyone’s internal thermometer. The most emphatic was that even though women have an extra layer of fat, men are just fat and stupid, so it cancels out. However, we couldn’t come to a consensus. That drove me to the Great Oracle of the Web.

The Journal of Physiology, of course, had it down cold. Quoting a South African study: “Body temperature has a circadian rhythm, and in women with ovulatory cycles, also a menstrual rhythm. … We investigated sleep and 24-hour rectal temperatures in eight women with normal menstrual cycles in their mid-follicular and mid-luteal phases, and in eight young women taking a steady dose of oral progestin and ethinyl oestradiol (hormonal contraceptive), and compared their sleep and body temperatures with that of eight young men, sleeping in identical conditions. All subjects maintained their habitual daytime schedules.

“Rectal temperatures were elevated throughout 24 hours in the luteal phase compared with the follicular phase in the naturally cycling women, consistent with a raised thermoregulatory set-point. Rectal temperatures in the women taking hormonal contraceptives were similar to those of the naturally cycling women in the luteal phase. Gender influenced body temperature: the naturally cycling women and the women taking hormonal contraceptives attained their nocturnal minimum body temperatures earlier than the men, and the naturally cycling women had blunted nocturnal body temperature drops compared with the men.”

That should clear it up once and for all.

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.

CASHING A DEPOSIT ON SANITY

I couldn’t tell if the gamma rays from space had gotten so intense that the garage was shrinking or my car was growing. Then it dawned on me.

Plastic bag after plastic bag full of unreturned returnable bottles that had begun as a small stack in one corner had seemingly taken on a life of their own. Like unwatched hangers in dark closets, they were multiplying virtually before my very eyes.

It was time to take things in hand — those things being five bags full of plastic that barely fit in the trunk of my Smallmobile. A quick spin to the closest market with bottle-return machines would do the trick.

Eventually that trick was accomplished, but at the cost of 90 minutes out of a pleasant afternoon and a slight case of repetitive stress syndrome; 345 bottles will do that, especially when you have to put 15% of them into the machine a second time because it couldn’t read the bottle code the first time through.

There was some small comfort in the fact there were at least 10 other people vying for time on the machines — a more competitive experience than trying to get time on one of the treadmills at health clubs that oversell their memberships. Or, so I’m told. Thus, I’m sure there are larger garages throughout the neighborhood today.

AIR YOU CAN CHEW

I can hardly wait until the city delivers my quarterly water bill.

Yesterday morning I emerged from our air-conditioned cocoon, took in a deep lungful of air, and began to chew it. Yes, air so thick it has substance, what with the amount of moisture and microscopic airborne particles.

The first thing that comes to mind on such days is how good a nice, long shower would feel. And, the showerheads have been getting quite a workout. Because showers use a bit less water than baths, I take consolation that the situation could be worse, dollarwise, although the cost of laundering the endless pile of bath towels occasioned by the maniacal showering probably offsets the saving.

In a society in which many of us live in hermetically sealed splendor — darting from our air-conditioned homes into our air-conditioned cars and then darting into our air-conditioned workplaces, then reversing the cycle — all this talk of chewy air and overworked showerheads may seem a bit frivolous. But it is, after all, Indian summer. ‘Tis the time for frivolity of one sort or another. So, shower with a friend or loved one.

Better still, shower with a stranger. It’ll give you so much more to talk about.

WE DIDN’T THINK YOU’D NOTICE

It’s really annoying how you Earthlings keep improving your technology and “discovering” things that have been right under your collective noses for so long.

We had such a good thing going, putting all our toxic wastes into capsules and shooting them out into the Solar System. So what if a bunch of them had a habit of landing in your oceans?

But, I suppose good things don’t last forever. And, neither do those capsules. Once they start disintegrating all that glop leaks out and you get these huuuuge patches of shining water. We were OK as long as your technology was backward; where do you think all those old stories about glowing monsters beneath the ocean came from? But now, you’ve managed to get pictures taken from space and started to zero in on the images.

Here’s how it was reported by the BBC:

‘MILKY SEAS’ DETECTED FROM SPACE

Mariners over the centuries have reported surreal, nocturnal displays of glowing sea surfaces stretching outwards to the horizon. Little is known about these “milky seas” other than that they are probably caused by luminous bacteria.

But the first satellite detection of this strange phenomenon in the Indian Ocean may now aid future research.

The observation is described by a U.S. team in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The glowing sea covered an area about the size of Connecticut and was observed over three consecutive nights, with the first night corroborated by a ship-based account.

The scientists analysed data from satellites fitted with special sensors. These are normally used for detecting moonlight reflections off clouds about one million times fainter than the Sun, but milky seas emit light even fainter than this.

The team searched ship reports for suitable events to match with the archived satellite data. A reported sighting in the north-western Indian Ocean on 25 January 1995 by a British merchant vessel, the SS Lima, met the criteria.

Despite the weak signal, the researchers were able to see a distinct feature in the satellite imagery.

“I overlaid the points of the ship they reported when they were in it, and when they left it, and they matched up,” Dr. Steve Miller, from the Naval Research Laboratory in California, told the BBC News website.

The area continued to glow for three nights, and its movements correlated with known sea surface currents.

Some bacterial species have evolved the ability to convert chemical energy to light energy. The next generation of satellite sensors will be even more sensitive, enabling scientists to send out research vessels to investigate these milky seas as they occur.

“Maybe we’ll be able to detect these more often, more reliably, and in locations we don’t anticipate right now,” Miller said.

Milky seas are distinct from the brief flashes of bioluminescence seen at ships’ wakes, or breaking waves, which are caused by microscopic algae called dinoflagellates. Instead, the constant light emitted over a wide area probably comes from the luminous bacteria Vibrio harveyi, living in association with microalgal blooms.

The team was able to estimate of the number of bacteria that the observed area would have contained, an abnormally “giant” population.

“To put it into context, it’s about 200 times more than the number of background, free-living bacteria that are spread over the continental shelf waters of all the oceans,” Miller said.

There have been 235 documented sightings of milky seas since 1915, mainly concentrated in the north-western Indian Ocean (see photo image above) and near Java, Indonesia.

You’re beginning to take the fun out of being the smartest beings in the solar system.

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°.

CRAPPY NEW YEAR

This already has been a whiz-bang of a new year to remember.

Despite the TV Weatherbeings predicting mild temps and relatively clear skies through the weekend surrounding New Year’s Eve, we ended up making our way through a serious snowfall, its droppings piling up in tricky spots thanks to strong wind gusts and below-freezing temperatures that helped increase the supply of dangerous black ice.

That doesn’t even take into account the pneumonia, bronchitis and general malaise that have afflicted the allegedly Higher Life Forms at our domicile up here on Weathering Heights for the past two weeks.

All in all, blechhh!, as Snoopy would put it.

But, in the spirit of new beginnings, we’ll give the local Weatherbeings another shot at getting it right. The consensus for tomorrow is some snow, a high of 34° and a low of 19°. Yeah, we’ll see about that.

COOL IT ON GLOBAL WARMING

A year ago at this time, according to the archives we just dusted off up here on the Heights, the daytime temperatures were in the 40ish range. Now, they are the same. So much for global warming.

Alright, alright, it’s not supposed to be 40ish at this time of year, according to our experience. I know. I just have difficulty lamenting a change in global weather conditions we really can’t do anything about.

I have no confidence that removing SUVs and hairspray cans from civilization will cool down the world’s climate. In my view, based on eons of historic records, “global warming,” such as it is, is part of a natural cycle of hot and cold that our esteemed planet goes through no matter what we or any other carbon-based life forms may do.

The difficulty most humans have is that they judge such things by their own existence clock, forgetting that our lifetimes are less than a speck on the tail of a flea in comparison to the whole span of time.

For those of you who insist on looking at things in the short term, however, tomorrow’s forecast calls for a lot more sun with a high in the mid-40s and a low in the high 20s.

THIS JUST IN: PLAGUE AFFECTS CLIMATE

“Global warming” notwithstanding, this winter’s killer storms and sub-zero temperatures have wreaked havoc across Europe. Perhaps a few centuries from now, scientists will figure out why.

Why a few centuries? It took them that long to figure out that the “Black Death” — bubonic plague — that wiped out about a third of Europe’s population in the 14th Century may also have triggered what is known as the Little Ice Age, a 300-year period of markedly decreased temperatures.

Say what? Well, using what some may now label Chaos Theory, think about how small things can cause other things. The popular example is the movement of a butterfly’s wings eventually causing a storm a continent away.

With so many people dying, untended and abandoned farmland wound up going back to nature, with trees and bushes taking over formerly tended fields. Pollen and leaf data, researchers say, support the idea that millions of trees sprang up, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which, in turn, had the effect of cooling the climate.

A team from Utrecht University in the Netherlands notes that such a happenstance coincides with the drop in average temperatures across Europe at that time. Of course, not everyone believes in this latest theory. Tim Lenton, an environmental scientist from the University of East Anglia in England, told the BBC, “It is a nice study and the carbon dioxide changes could certainly be a contributory factor, but I think they are too modest to explain all the climate change seen.”

And Richard Houghton, a climate expert from the Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod, says that the oceans would have compensated for the change. “The atmosphere is in equilibrium with the ocean and this tends to dampen or offset small changes in terrestrial carbon uptake,” he explained.