Backyard and Beyond

David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature is a must-read. Haskell observes a small patch of (very rare) old-growth Tennessee forest through the course of a year and reports on what he experiences, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. It is a book of meditations, grounded, quite literally, in a little patch of woodlands. I highly recommend it. See also Haskell’s blog.

Take, for instance, Haskell’s chapter on deer. He begins with the intimate relationship of gut biota in a ruminant, which allows it to eat plant material that we non-ruminants simply can’t stomach. (The part of this biological fact we are most familiar with is the meat industry’s feeding of corn to cows, which makes these grass-eaters sort of permanently sick, so that they are pumped full of antibiotics — analogous to our over-medicated society — which spread through the environment and, part and parcel of the environment, ourselves). From there he considers our contemporary deer problem, vast herds overbrowsing the forests and the suburbs. But things become more complex, considering our conceptions of woodlands were largely formed during a time when the deer population was nearly non-existent, an anomaly in North American history. Pre-Columbian Native Americans lived in regions filled to the brim with deer, a primary source of protein as well as a raw material for their entire culture; indeed, by making edge habitat with fire, they fostered deer parks. And before any humans were in North America, a reign of megafauna herbivores munched away at the forests, probably making deer-browse look amateurish. So what then is “natural” here?

Speaking of nature, Haskell also recently published this wonderfully sly Op-Ed about the myriad forms of sexuality to coincide with the fundamentalist argument about the alleged unnaturalness of homosexuality in the Supreme Court. Why, just walking outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, one discovers bisexual trees; gay ducks; hermaphrodite snails (with their arrows of desire); fungi, which are more akin to animals than plants but which don’t have sexes as either animals or plants would understand the term; and intersexed humans, who are born with characteristics of both the male and the female.

The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex, by John A. Long.

“We all know about the birds and the bees…” goes the jacket and webpage copy for this book, but do we? In fact, I can’t think of an stranger duo of examples to be used as an euphemism for courtship and sex. Queen honey bees, for instance, are impregnated by multiple drones on their mating flights; the male bees are torn asunder in the process and fall to earth to die afterwards. While many birds have complicated courtship rituals, including nest and bower building, the actual fertilization is extremely brief. Cloaca (charmingly, from the Latin for sewer) connect, sperm is exchanged, and that’s it. The fastest copulation on record is a bird’s; the dunnocks take a tenth of a second, while flying. Since birds are essentially dinosaurs, does this mean the dinosaurs did it the same way, too? Probably not, actually, because flightless birds like ostriches and emus have penises (defined here as “any male reproductive structure used to transfer sperm into a female” for internal fertilization), and so do ducks and geese, and these species are genetically more primitive, that is, closer to the originating dinosaurs, than perching birds. Passerines don’t need penises and have dropped them, so to speak, over evolutionary time.

Author Long was one of the discoverers of a 380-million year old placoderm fossil in Australia that revealed an embryo, the oldest evidence of internal fertilization. Placoderms were armored fish-like animals common on earth until extinction about 359 million years ago; current thinking pegs them as the ancestor of all jawed animals. This finding becomes the wide-ranging focus of the question of internal fertilization, perhaps the most complicated form of animal reproduction, and the nature of the tools necessary for such processes.

Speaking of tools… is it inevitable that such a topic brings out the bad puns? Maybe only amongst us boys. There a couple such groaners here, including the title. The original Australian title of the book suggests some extra-cultural differences: Hung Like An Argentine Duck. The males of the duck species in question have a corkscrew-shaped penis longer than their bodies, but it’s the goose barnacle that takes the prize. In some species, the barnacle penis can be up to eight times the length of the body. Barnacles also shed and then grow new ones every year. Barnacle willies are also habitat sensitive: rough water will result in different shapes than calm water. Somehow, though, I doubt this information will be entering the popular discourse.

This edition was published by the University of Chicago Press. There are examples of horrendous editing in its pages. There’s a lot of this in books now, but it’s more distressing when found in a university press edition.

Tonight’s full moon is the Sturgeon Moon. August will also have a Blue Moon, or second full moon within the month, on the 31st.

Those were the days, when sturgeon were once so common on the East Coast and Great Lakes that Native Americans set their lunar calendar to them. Now these ancient fish are few and far between, and there are damn few of the big ones left. As with tuna, cod, etc. (and trees!) our unnatural selection of the large specimens has meant that it’s been the small fry who get to reproduce, leading over time to physically smaller populations (as well as greatly reduced numbers as well, of course, via unsustainable harvests).

And speaking of time:Turney, Chris. Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. London: Macmillan, 2008.

Earth: 4.5 billion years old. Extinction of the dinosaurs: 65 million years ago. Homo erectus: 1.8 million years ago. Homo sapiens: 200,000 years ago. Settlement of Australia: 40-60,000 years ago (by boat, people, by boat!). Last Neanderthal: 25-30,000 years ago.

How do we know these dates (as vague as some of the are)? Chris Turney explains radiocarbon, potassium-argon, argon-argon, amino acid racemization, accelerator mass spectrometry, electron spin resonance, luminescence (optically stimulated and thermo), uranium series, and uranium-lead dating, as well as tree rings, cultural typologies, and the calendar. None of these is foolproof, although tree rings are surprisingly close, though they only go back a few thousand years, and have the added benefit of being a climate marker. The calendar itself is fascinating, a jumble of traditions dating back (but when precisely?) to the Babylonians. The Egyptians kept good records, but reset their calendars with every king. I’ve always thought the BC thing, counting backwards, was pure crazy. And it turns out this Jesus fellow was supposedly born four years Before Christ was born. Go figure.

But one of the oddest things re: calendars was the transition from the Julian calendar, which was more than a week off by the 18th century; this updating was delayed in Protestant countries like Britain because they thought moving to the Gregorian calandar, however more accurate, would be too papist. But eventually the Brits did it (along with British North America): the 2nd of September, 1752, was a Wednesday, and it was followed by Thursday, the 14th of September, 1752. “Give us our eleven days” says the banner on the floor in this Hogarth riot:Hence the “O.S.” for Old Style found in early 18th century dates. Because of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russia didn’t update until the 1917 Revolution.

Damn poor design to have the planet not run on schedule.