Readers’ wildlife photos (and videos)

March 6, 2019 • 7:30 am

We’re running a bit low on photos, at least sufficiently low that I’m getting nervous. I may have to suspend this feature in a week or so unless we get some good readers’ photos.  If you have ’em, please send ’em. And remember to give the Latin binomial and to try to limit each submission to ten picture. Thanks!

Today we have some nice underwater photos (and videos given in links) from reader Peter Klaver, whose words are indented:

Here are some pictures and links to video from scuba diving trips we had in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba (at times when the Sinai peninsula was less dangerous to go to than it has been for much of the time since then).
Here is a third batch from diving trips in Egypt. We saw bluespotted ribbontail rays, Taeniura lymma, on several occasions.

Sometimes they cover themselves with sand a bit.

But we saw them swimming too, like in the video here.
In addition to hard corals, giant clams, Tridacna gigas, grow there too. If you come near them they can sense that and they will sometimes close up, as you can see in the video here. I estimate the one in the picture below was ~30 cm long.

Crocodile fish, Papilloculiceps longiceps, blend in well with the bottom.

Box fish (no idea which one this is, or its Latin name) on the other hand stand out clearly.

I think this pufferfish is Arothron stellatus.

Moray eels are a common site but mostly just their heads sticking out of rock openings. But we did see one out and about, see video clip here.

And finally, we did our diving from liveaboard boats. At one point we had dolphins (Delphinus capensis or Delphinus delphis?) playing around our vessel.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 6, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday, March 6, 2019, with 300 days left to go in 2019. It remains cold in Chicago, though the temperatures may get up to the freezing point today.  It’s National Oreo Day (watch for their limited special-edition flavors), and The Day of the Dude, stemming from the film The Big Lebowski, which I recently saw but didn’t much care for. It’s also the first day of Lent, so you have to give up Oreos.

In news for those of you who live in Oz or NZ and favor royalism, here’s an article from news.com.au about how the Royal Family is mistreating Megan Markle. Of course, nobody would have any interest in this, or in Prince Philip or Prince Harry or Prince Charles if these mundane people weren’t part of an anointed Special Class of People, unelected and unworthy, who get to live their whole lives in palaces and have servants prepare their food and wait on them.

On this day in 632, Muhammad is reported to have given his Farewell Sermon, which can be summarized as “Do what I told you to do!” On this day in 1521, Magellan and his fleet reached Guam. It was to be the end of the line for him, for in April he was murdered by natives in the Philippines.  And on March 6, 1788, the “First Fleet”, carrying convicts to Australia, hauled up at Norfolk Island to found the first convict settlement.

It was on March 6, 1836, that the end of the Battle of the Alamo came after a 13-day siege by the Mexican army.  All 187 Texas defenders, including Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, were killed.  On this day in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court settled the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The judges ruled that blacks could not be citizens, and the U.S. government could not regulate slavery in territories created after the founding of the country.  It is not, of course, regarded now as a legally binding precedent.

On this day in 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev presented his first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society. Here is his draft of the table and a transcription:

On this day in 1951, the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began. They were convicted and electrocuted on June 19, 1953.  And on March 6, 1953, one day after Stalin’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Georgy Malinkov succeeded him as Premier of the Soviet Union and First Secretary of the Communist Party.  He lost all powers two years later.  On this day in 1964, Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, rechristened Cassius Clay as Muhammad Ali.  Finally (and I remember this), it was on this day in 1970 that an explosion in a Weather Underground safe house in Manhattan killed three WU members.

Notables born on this day include Michelangelo (1475), Cyrano de Bergerac (1619), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806), Ring Lardner (1885), Lou Costello (1906), Alan Greenspan (1926, still with us at 93), Gabriel García Márquez (1927), Loren Maazel (1930), Kiri Te Kanawa (1944; she’s 75 today, see the celebration at Radio New Zealand), Rob Reiner (1947), Carolyn Porco (1953), and Glenn Greenwald (1967).

Here’s Dame Kiri (the honorific derives from Royal decree) singing my favorite operatic aria thirty years ago. The London Philharmonic accompanies:

Those who bought the farm on this day include Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett (1836, died in Battle of the Alamo), William Whewell (1866), John Philip Sousa (1932), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1935), Nelson Eddy (1967), Pearl S. Buck (1973), Ayn Rand (1982), Georgia O’Keeffe (1986), Hans Bethe (2005, Nobel Laureate), and Nancy Reagan (2015).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is in her usual state: ravenous.

Hili: We have a problem.
A: What problem?
Hili: We have to feed me.
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy problem.
Ja: Jaki?
Hili: Musimy mnie nakarmić.

A picture from Facebook:

From reader Barry, a sin-absolving app:

Heather Hastie says, “I hate humans for doing this”, and I have to agree that creating mutants that have medical or thermoregulatory issues is not the best idea. Behold the Gollum Cat:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1099781179665014788

Tweets from Grania. Here’s the first known species to go extinct because of climate change, but of course they mean anthropogenic climate change, as many species have gone extinct over evolutionary history because of climate change. Next: the polar bear.

It’s so sad that the species below is extinct, despite some ornithologists who think otherwise based on unreliable “sightings”:

Do you think this pigeon really is having fun, or is just dumb?

Let’s see this one again. What a nice man to not offer the peas until both ducks show up! If you snooze with such fast eaters, you lose!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1102094361997787136

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is a dime-sized spider nest, or, as Matthew calls it, “Spiderhenge”:

This is from March 2, and I don’t know who Cherry Wainer is, but Matthew thought this was noteworthy:

Ivan once was lost. . . but now he’s found (after two days):

I am fond of hamsters (the name alone make me smile), but I hope this one didn’t hurt its baby:

 

 

A montage of stirring photos

March 5, 2019 • 3:30 pm

Sometimes when I eat lunch I watch YouTube videos, and of course they suggest other videos on the right margin because the damn site collects your history. Well, that’s not all bad, because I like to look at photography, and so this 15-minute video was suggested to me. There are some wonderful photos here, and some affirmations of humanity, as well as some sad photos and amazing ones, too. Each photo in the 77-picture series is described in words.

My favorites are these:

2
3
5
6
13
16
17
26
28
34
40
46
48
65
71
72 and
74

I like the ones with cats, of course, but there are many with tragedy, including war, and many showing human compassion. I don’t see any real theme in what I like, but after seeing this I thought, “What a fantastic and varied thing is this life that we’re granted. It’s a mixture of happiness and tragedy and the wonder of quotidian things that we often fail to notice. Why would anybody get tired of this and want to die?”

Good news and bad news. Now the bad news: the Canadian government funds homeopathy!

March 5, 2019 • 1:45 pm

It’s bad enough that Justin Trudeau seems to be going down over his government’s political interference with a criminal prosecution, but now we hear that the Canadian government has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to homeopaths to practice their woo in another country—Honduras.  Click on this CBC report below to see the bad news:

Yep, $70K per year to give water to prevent Chagas’s disease. Another CBC report notes that this has been going on for five years, so $350,000 has been spent—to no effect except endangering sufferers.

Excerpts from the CBC article above:

Physicians who go on aid missions abroad want the federal government to review its funding of a program that sends homeopaths to Honduras because of the potential harm to local people.

Since 2015, Quebec-based Terre Sans Frontières (TSF) has been spending $70,000 annually in aid money from Global Affairs Canada to dispatch more than a dozen volunteer homeopaths to Honduras.

The money runs out in 2020. But Dr. Zain Chagla wants the federal government to review the homeopath program which claims to prevent and treat Chagas disease among other serious infections.

“I really do believe this is a wake-up call,” he said.

Chagla, who has done tropical medicine training in East Africa and is a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, said the homeopaths’ claims about treating Chagas disease are potentially harmful.

“There is no evidence that what they’re using is anything more than diluted water. It’s a placebo, and we’re talking about a disease that can again kill and cause a significant amount of scarring down the line,” he said.

. . .Under the Honduran Health Code of 1966, homeopathy, naturopathy and “other occupations considered to be harmful or useless” were banned until the code was rewritten in 1994.

The Montreal naturopath who leads the Honduran missions, Carla Marcelis, referred to homeopathy as “a beautiful way to use the body’s own healing system to come to healing” in a promotional video about the Honduras missions.

The video also shows how Marcelis’s team has instructed locals about how homeopathic remedies can prevent serious viral infections from dengue, influenza and Chikungunya.

Marcelis is in Honduras, and CBC News has been unable to make contact with her.

As for who in Canada is responsible for this travesty:

After our initial story, CBC News contacted the office of the federal minister responsible for international development for an interview but was denied.

Instead spokesperson Maegan Graveline reaffirmed Global Affairs’s support for the homeopaths in an email, “The World Health Organization and Pan American Health Organization in its 2014–2023 strategy encourage the integration of traditional medicine and complementary medicine, including homeopathy, into national health systems”.

Well, I’ll leave this in the hands of Canadian readers, as I wouldn’t know who to complain to about this. But the money surely comes from Canadian taxpayers, and is being wasted on superstition. Worse, by pretending that Magic Water works to cure diseases, this practice endangers the people of Honduras.

Good news and bad news. First, the good news: New Zealand repeals its blasphemy law

March 5, 2019 • 12:30 pm

When I was a kid, my dad would ask me this question. “Jerry, I have some good news and some  bad news. Which do you want to hear first?”

I’d say, “The good news.”

My father would respond: “The good news is that there’s no bad news.”

Then I’d ask, “Well, what’s the bad news, then?”

And my father would respond, “The bad news is that’s the only good news there is.”

You can do the same if the person asks first for the bad news. You then say, “The bad news is that there’s no good news.” When the person responds by asking, “Well what’s the good news?”, you answer, “That’s the only bad news there is.”

But today we have genuine good and bad news.  The good news is that today New Zealand finally repealed its law against blasphemous libel, passed in 1961, which stated this:

Note that what they’re talking about here is, as this site reports, anything that “condemns Christ or Christianity.” But the proviso in (3), which says that you’re not blaspheming if you’re making arguments in good faith and decent language, pretty much rendered the law toothless.  And indeed, there’s been only a single prosecution for violating this law in sixty years:

To date the only prosecution for blasphemous libel in New Zealand has been the case of John Glover, publisher of the newspaper The Maoriland Worker in 1922, although the poem was widely available at the time. The Crown laid a charge of blasphemous libel over the 12 October 1921 issue of The Maoriland Worker which included two poems by British poet Siegfried Sassoon. The alleged blasphemy was the closing lines of Sassoon’s poem ‘Stand-to: Good Friday Morning’:

O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,
And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,
And get my bloody old sins washed white!

The case was tried in the Supreme Court in 1922. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty with a rider: “That similar publications of such literature be discouraged”.

NZ authorities also tried to censor Monty Python’s Life of Brian and an episode of South Park using this statute, but both efforts failed. The law is, as are all such laws, a vestige of an earlier and more religious time, and, at least in the West, hardly every used.

So today the New Zealand Parliament voted to scrap it.  According to the NZ site Newshub,

[On] Tuesday the Government scrapped the law it labels as “archaic” with the passing of the Crimes Amendment Bill.

“The offence of blasphemous libel has not been prosecuted in New Zealand since 1922, and raises potential Bill of Rights Act concerns,” said Justice Minister Andrew Little.

“This obsolete provision has no place in a modern society which protects freedom of expression.”

Mr Little said laws should be relevant to modern society and the last time a blasphemous libel case was considered, in 1998, the Solicitor-General rejected it.

“The view was expressed that it would be inconsistent with the freedom of expression as protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act,” said Mr Little.

As the Wikipedia page notes, “The Bill passed the second reading on the 11 December 2018, the Committee of the Whole House on the 20 February 2019, and the third reading on 5 March 2019. It awaits the royal assent to become law.”

For crying out loud, Kiwis, you are still under the thumb of Queen Elizabeth. Can a bill not become law without the fricking Queen assenting?

Curiously, I have yet to find a single Kiwi who wishes their land to be free from any sort of royal oversight, which seems to me an equally vestigial remnant of an earlier time. A land full of royalists! I’m sure some readers will defend the fact that Elizabeth is officially the Queen of New Zealand, but this makes no sense in a democracy, nor does the idea that the Queen of England should have any iota of power over the citizens of New Zealand.

h/t: Grania

Monument to Wallace unveiled in Indonesia

March 5, 2019 • 11:15 am

by Greg Mayer

George Beccaloni, fellow Wallaceophile, has sent word that a monument to Alfred Russel Wallace has been erected on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Wallace Monument, Tangkoko Nature Reserve, Sulawesi. Photo by Simon Purser.

As described at the Alfred Russel Wallace Website of the Wallace Memorial Fund by George and Simon Purser, the monument is a full bust, greater than life size (about 5-6 feet tall), on a nearly 9 foot tall plinth. It’s in the Tangkoko Nature Reserve, near Batu Putih, in the northeastern part of Sulawesi, an area Wallace visited during his travels in the East Indies. Wallace described the area in The Malay Archipelago as a particularly wild spot, with anoa (dwarf buffalo) and babirusa (an endemic pig) common. Those ungulates are gone from the area today, but it remains a popular spot for birding and seeing the Celebes black “ape” (actually a monkey; “Celebes” is an earlier, Portuguese, spelling of the Indonesian name of the island).

Bill Wallace, Alfred’s great grandson, prepared a video greeting shown to the assembled dignitaries at the monument’s inauguration.

Here at WEIT we’ve often commented on the great British naturalist, and readers will recall our several Wallace Year (2013) commemorations.

Wallace bust at Tangkoko.