Readers’ wildlife photos (with more science)

August 20, 2017 • 8:30 am

We have another great installment in Professor Bruce Lyon‘s series of researches on the biology and behavioral evolution of American coots (Fulica americana). He added this in his email: “This one is a bit different since it focuses on one very specific study and quite a bit on a former student of mine but I think your readers might enjoy a behind-the-scenes view of how science is often done. Lay people often have a Hollywood view of how science is done (antisocial nerds in lab coats, everything turning out just as the complex math on the blackboard” predicts).

Bruce’s notes are indented.

Another installment about our work with American coots (previous posts here, here, here, here). Today I focus on an amazing discovery made by my former PhD student Dai Shizuka (now a professor in Nebraska). In my PhD thesis work, I concluded that American coots do not recognize brood parasitic chicks. With a combination of key natural history insights and elegant experiments, Dai proved me wrong and I was delighted about the outcome. This research was the single most exciting project I have ever been involved with.

The story has a few messages that may interest readers—the discoveries themselves, but also the important realization that science is often a messy meandering path to enlightenment. Experiments often fail, but sometimes in ways that yield important new insights. In addition, incidental natural history observations that initially seem weird and puzzling can turn out to be vitally important for figuring out what is going on. And a bonus coincidence: Dai Shizuku was a postdoc with Jerry’s colleague Trevor Price at Chicago and was based in the lab right next door to Jerry for a year.

Below: Dai Shizuka at our BC site.

Below: My initial conclusion that coots don’t recognize parasitic chicks was not surprising given what we know about the more famous interspecific brood parasites like cuckoos and cowbirds. Virtually all of their hosts fail to recognize parasitic chicks, even when the difference between host and parasite is ridiculous, as the photo below of a common cuckoo (Cuculus canoris) and Eurasian reed warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceusshows. The cuckoo chick looks nothing like the host and is several times larger than its foster parents (photo from the web). This lack of chick recognition has long been an evolutionary puzzle, particularly because the hosts are often extremely good at recognizing cuckoo eggs that differ only subtly from their own eggs.

Below: Back to within species parasitism in coots: can you spot the parasites? I bet you can’t because I would not be able to do so without notes on which chicks came from which eggs. This is an experimental brood that contains some chicks that are not the host’s own chicks (I know this because we added them to the brood).

Dai did not set out to study chick recognition; this would have been a crazy idea for a PhD project given the lack of recognition in systems like cuckoo hosts. Instead, he was interested in the function of the extreme hatching asynchrony coots show and he set up some exploratory experiments in which he created synchronously hatching broods by swapping chicks between nests.

Below: We hatch all of the coot chicks in incubators at the field cabin, which makes it easy to swap chicks among broods for experiments. We collect eggs from their nest as soon as they show signs of hatching (slight cracks on the shell) and return the hatched chicks to a nest (home or foster nest depending on the experiment) on the day they hatch. Due to the hatching asynchrony, we have to visit the same nest several days in a row to get all of the hatching eggs and releasing chicks back to the nest. The photo below shows Dai processing chicks in our three incubators.

Swapping offspring among families (called cross fostering) has a long history in evolutionary biology; it is used in heritability studies to control for environmental affects on traits. A critically important assumption is that foster parents treat the cross-fostered offspring as they would their own, but of course coots have a mind of their own. Dai came to me one day with both bad and good news. The bad news: the cross fostering experiments failed as a method to investigate hatch patterns because the fostered chicks had significantly worse survival than the host’s own chicks. The good news: this survival pattern suggested that coots might be able to recognize some parasitic chicks. Cross fostering is like adding parasitic chicks to a brood; the birds are given chicks of another pair, and when these chicks do worse it would most likely be due to discrimination by the foster parents. These preliminary results called for a full-scale experimental study to investigate chick recognition!

The following year we repeated the same experiment but with a much larger sample size. After a hell of a lot of work, we found no evidence for recognition. The year after that, more experiments and more toiling, but again not a shred of evidence for recognition. We even did a second experiment that involved cross fostering chicks while maintaining the normal pattern of hatching asynchrony, but this too failed to show evidence for recognition.

Now, a sane person would have given up at this point and concluded that the birds really don’t recognize parasitic chicks. However, Mother Nature kept teasing us with tantalizing signs that these birds really can distinguish their own chicks from brood parasites. While conducting brood observations from a floating blind, both parents of a brood I was observing suddenly turned on one of their chicks and began to peck at it really aggressively in a way that differed from normal spankings. There were several bouts of these attacks and it seemed they occurred whenever the chick called out. I eventually lost track of the chick, but Dai found it dead in the marsh a few hours later. Its tag revealed something really interesting—the chick was from a brood parasitic egg! This was the first time we had witnessed direct infanticide and it involved a brood parasite. The video below shows this attack:

Second, adoption is very rare in our population, so it was bizarre when a coot pair adopted three chicks from their neighbor. Checking the chick ID’s in our records revealed that all three adoptees were from parasitic eggs the adopting female had laid in the neighbor’s nest. The parasitic chicks had come back home to their biological parents! If this story involved humans, Hollywood would be asking for a movie script about now. This observation suggested that the parents recognized the chicks as their biological kids even though they had hatched in the neighbor’s nest.

These intriguing natural history observations suggested that we were missing something with our experiments. The critical missing piece came from an observation of what appeared to be a completely deranged pair of coots. Once again I was in a floating blind observing a pair of coots with their very recently hatched chicks. Everything seemed to be normal but then a switch seemed to go off—one of the parents started to kill its own chicks, one by one, until they had all been killed off. I was stunned because we had never seen anything like this before and we were also certain that these were the biological chicks of these parents.  Here is a video showing the chick killing behavior (a different brood from experiments described below but it shows exactly the behavior I saw with the killer parents):

Several days later, over dinner, Dai made sense of why these birds went crazy, and he had an epiphany that solved everything. During dinner discussions, one of the field assistants recalled seeing the crazy killer parent coots feeding two chicks for a short period of time before their own eggs hatched. These birds had temporarily adopted their neighbors’ chicks before their own eggs had hatched, but the chicks returned home before the pair’s own eggs hatched. Dai reasoned that coots learn to recognize their chicks and that the short exposure to the wrong kids had caused these parents to learn from the wrong chicks and then when their own chicks hatched, to incorrectly see their own chicks as brood parasites.

This line of thinking led to the hypothesis that coots learn to recognize their chicks by imprinting on the chicks that hatch on the first day—they use these first hatched chicks as reference chicks to learn some recognition feature that they could then apply to chicks that hatch on the following days. The simple rule of using chicks that hatch on the first hatching day would be a pretty reliable rule since at most nests, only host chicks hatch on the first hatching day. The chicks’ features that the parents learn could involve vocalizations, smell or visual appearance—or a combination of these. To be useful, the features would have to vary among pairs but not within a pair’s own brood—just like the way they recognize eggs. This hypothesis could also explain our consistent failures up to that point. If parents learn from the chicks that hatch on the first day, then parents at nests where both hosts and parasites hatch on the first day would learn that both chick types are their own and would not be able to recognize parasite chicks. This was the design of all of previous experiments. Doh!

These insights came near the end of what was supposed to be the final field season of the project, but we decided that the idea was so interesting that it needed to be tested. So we went back one final year—it was do or die for showing that coots recognize parasitic chicks.

We conducted two main experiments to test Dai’s hypothesis. Since we hatch all chicks in captivity, we got to decide which chicks parents are exposed to, and in what order. In the ‘host first’ experiment, we gave birds their own chicks on the first hatch day, and then gave an equal mix of host and foreign chick on each day after that. Foreign chicks were chicks from a second brood and are the equivalent of brood parasites. The graphic below shows the experimental design. If parents use the day 1 chicks to learn which chicks are their own, then we can predict that the foreign (‘parasite’) chicks will survive less well than the host chicks (assessed only for chicks from days when both types hatch). For testing mechanisms like learning, real proof comes from tricking the birds to do the wrong thing. We therefore did a second experiment where birds were given only foreign chicks on day 1 and then an equal mix of host and foreign on later days (‘foreign first’ experiment). If the birds really do learn from the first hatched chicks then they should imprint on wrong chicks and discriminate against their own chicks.

After setting up the first few experiments, we were on pins and needles. Then, after surveying only three broods I knew that we had finally broken the curse. The results were so clear and strong that we now had convincing experimental evidence that coots can recognize parasitic chicks. Birds given their own chicks on the first day were able to recognize many of the parasitic chicks that hatched from day 2 onward, while birds given somebody else’s chicks on the first day treated their own chicks as parasitic. Evidence for recognition came from big survival differences between chick types that matched predictions. And these survival differences happened so quickly that we were barely able to see what exactly was causing them (the differences had already happened before our first survey on most broods). However, we were able to watch a few broods right at hatching to see what was happening. Just like the deranged pair of coots that killed all of their own kids, these birds very quickly dispatched many of the chicks that were the ‘wrong’ chicks. In three broods we only saw the female culling the chicks but in another brood both sexes were involved. Our experiment not only showed chick recognition, but how it occurs: parents learn something about the chicks that hatch on the first day. We do not yet know what information the parents learn but I strongly suspect that the information is in the chicks’ vocalizations.

We are aware that experiments like ours do raise some ethical considerations. However, keep in mind that we did not create unnatural behaviors that do not normally exist. Moreover, at our site each year thousands of coot chicks die naturally from starvation; it is not clear to me that this is a kinder fate than what happens to the brood parasite chicks.

Duck update

August 20, 2017 • 8:00 am

After a day’s disappearance from the pond, Honey returned yesterday and ate a huge breakfast of corn (my mealworms arrived yesterday afternoon, so she hasn’t yet had any). She was asleep at teatime so I didn’t feed her.

This morning she’s gone again. I wonder if she’s flying about now, and then returning to the pond for assured noms. Since I don’t have a photo from today or yesterday, here’s a photo I took on June 28, showing her brood of three drakes and one hen. They’ve long since taken off, but you can see (rear duck) that at that time Honey hadn’t yet molted as she has her long wing feathers.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 20, 2017 • 6:45 am

It’s Sunday, August 20, and that means I have a wedding to attend this afternoon. And that means that posting will be light today as I break out the coat, tie, fancy boots, and hie myself downtown. It’s National Bacon Lovers Day, and the site offers five fun (and some dubious) facts about bacon:

  1. Bacon is one of the oldest processed meats in history. The Chinese began salting pork bellies as early as 1500 B.C.
  2. More than half of all homes (53%) keep bacon on hand at all times
  3. Pregnant women should eat bacon. Choline, which is found in bacon, helps fetal brain development
  4. Each year in the US more than 1.7 billion lbs. of bacon are consumed
  5. Bacon is said to cure hangovers

Facts 3 and 5 are the dubious ones. #3 might be right (as they say, “ask your doctor”), but I know from experience that #5 doesn’t work in everyone. It’s also World Mosquito Day, so take a mosquito to dinner. (If you’re offering a blood meal, it’ll have to be a female.)

It’s a big day for evolution aficionados, as it was on this day in 1858 that Darwin and Wallace published their joint papers on evolution by natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. This joint publication was the solution Darwin’s friends brokered when Wallace sent him, a few months earlier, a manuscript in which Wallace outlined a theory very similar to the one Darwin had been working on for decades. Of course Darwin published The Origin the next year, thereby gaining credit as “Mr. Evolution.” This page marks the formal beginning of evolutionary biology, though the papers didn’t excite much attention (that had to wait over a year until Darwin’s Origin):

On this day in 1882, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuted in Moscow, Russia. On April 20, 1920, the first commercial radio station in the world, then called “8MK” (now WWJ, and still on the air) started broadcasting in Detroit.

There were two events on this day in 1940. First, Leon Trotsky was attacked in Mexico City, getting a ice axe blow in the head. He died the next day. The murderer was Ramón Mercader, a communist born in Spain. Mercader served twenty years for the murder, and then was released to Cuba and then went to Russia, where he died in 1978. Here’s a picture I took when visiting Mexico City in 2011; it shows the desk Trotsky was sitting at when he was assaulted; I was told that the books and papers on the desk are unchanged from that moment:

And across the Atlantic, on the same day, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made one of his most famous wartime speeches, honoring the brave lads of the RAF during the Battle of Britain, which had begun on July 10, 1940. Churchill’s speech contained the famous line “Never was so much owed by so many to so few“. The source of that line is a bit unclear, but here’s an interesting take from Wikipedia:

However, in 1954 “Pug” Ismay related an anecdote to publisher Rupert Hart-Davis; when Churchill and Ismay were

“. . . travelling together in a car, in which Winston rehearsed the speech he was to give in the House of Commons on 20 August 1940 after the Battle of Britain. When he came to the famous sentence, ‘Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few’, Ismay said ‘What about Jesus and his disciples?’ ‘Good old Pug,’ said Winston’ who immediately changed the wording to ‘Never in the field of human conflict….”

Wikipedia notes the other three famous and eloquent speeches Churchill gave to buck up the Brits:

This speech was a great inspiration to the embattled United Kingdom during what was probably its most dangerous phase of the entire war. Together with the three famous speeches that he gave during the period of the Battle of France (the “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech of 13 May, the “We shall fight on the beaches” speech of 4 June and the “This was their finest hour” speech of 18 June), they form his most stirring rhetoric.

Fortunately the August 20 speech was recorded, and here it is. The description of the RAF’s exploits, containing the famous line, starts at 2:42:

Finally, on this day in 1998 Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that Quebec was not legally allowed to secede from Canada without the approval of the federal government. I suspect Canada will remain united forever.

Notables born on August 20 include Benjamin Harrison (1833), Paul Tillich (1886), H. P. Lovecraft (1890), Jack Teagarden (1905), Eero Saarinen (1910), Rajiv Gandhi (1944), Connie Chung (1946; I once lived across the hall from her and husband Maury Povich in a multi-unit condo), Robert Plant (1948), and Amy Adams (1974). Those who died on this day include the medical researcher and Nobel Laureate Paul Ehrlich (1915), Fred Hoyle (2001), and Elmore Leonard (2013).

Today’s Hili dialogue needed a bit of explanation, which Malgorzata provided: “Oh, yes, for Listy [Hili is the website’s editor]. She is lying on Andrzej’s desk chair, where most of Listy is produced. They are always fighting about this chair. Hili thinks that as an Editor-in-Chief she is absolutely entitled to it and that Andrzej should find some other place to sit.”

Hili: Are you aware what responsibility lies with me?
A: Of course.
In Polish:
Hili: Zdajesz sobie sprawę z tego, jaka odpowiedzialność na mnie ciąży?
Ja: Oczywiście.

Reader Bill from Oz sent a picture of himself with what I suspect is the same Talkeetna airport cat I showed in yesterday’s Hili dialogue. His comment:

In 2014, my wife and I, along with friends of ours from Minnesota, took the same trip to the top of Denali. We also encountered a lovely, smoochy cat (photos attached). I wonder if he is the same cat?
Here’s the Talkeeta airport cat I photographed in 2006. Same moggie or not? I’m pretty sure it is based on the smudging on the left cheek. So it was at least eight years older in the photo above.
There’s no Leon today, but the intrepid, Twitter-obsessed Matthew Cobb sends three tw**ts:

And I’m not sure of the language, but it looks as if moggies stepped in the dumplings. I don’t know the language. Translation, anyone?

And a reply!

https://twitter.com/farahalnanordin/status/899146628640067585

 

Agatha Christie on determinism and criminal justice

August 19, 2017 • 2:30 pm
Reader John found a passage in a nearly 90 year old Agatha Christie novel that presages the views of Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, and many other determinists on the application of determinism to our justice system. This is what John sent:
I  just read an Agatha Christie novel called “The Murder at the Vicarage” (published in 1930), and I found the following passage very interesting. Given your thoughts on determinism and capital punishment, I thought you’d enjoy reading it as well.
It is a conversation between a doctor (Haydock) and a vicar (Clement). The doctor is speaking first. The first-person narrator is the vicar.
The text follows; note that the doctor doesn’t say that people shouldn’t be punished, but that they should be sequestered to keep them out of society (he doesn’t mention rehabilitation or deterrence—other valid reasons for putting someone away). Emphases are mine.
************

“We think with horror now of the days when we burnt witches. I believe the day will come when we will shudder to think that we ever hanged criminals.” [Doctor]

“You don’t believe in capital punishment?” [Vicar]

“It’s not so much that.” He paused. “You know,” he said slowly, “I’d rather have my job than yours.”

“Why?”

“Because your job deals very largely with what we call right and wrong—and I’m not at all sure that there’s any such thing. Suppose it’s all a question of glandular secretion. Too much of one gland, too little of another—and you get your murderer, your thief, your habitual criminal. Clement, I believe the time will come when we’ll be horrified to think of the long centuries in which we’ve punished people for disease—which they can’t help, poor devils. You don’t hang a man for having tuberculosis.”

“He isn’t dangerous to the community.”

“In a sense he is. He infects other people. Or take a man who fancies he’s the Emperor of China. You don’t say how wicked of him. I take your point about the community. The community must be protected. Shut up these people where they can’t do any harm—even put them peacefully out of the way—yes, I’d go as far as that. But don’t call it punishment. Don’t bring shame on them and their innocent families.”

I looked at him curiously. “I’ve never heard you speak like this before.”

“I don’t usually air my theories abroad. Today I’m riding my hobby. You’re an intelligent man, Clement, which is more than some parsons are. You won’t admit, I dare say, that there’s no such thing as what is technically termed, ‘Sin,’ but you’re broadminded enough to consider the possibility of such a thing.”

“It strikes at the root of all accepted ideas,” I said.

“Yes, we’re a narrow-minded, self-righteous lot, only too keen to judge matters we know nothing about. I honestly believe crime is a case for the doctor, not the policeman and not the parson. In the future, perhaps, there won’t be any such thing.”

“You’ll have cured it?”

“We’ll have cured it. Rather a wonderful thought…”

*********

As Jake said at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

This passage is remarkably prescient. Thanks to John for transcribing it!

Ice cream versus “frozen dairy desserts”?

August 19, 2017 • 1:15 pm

For years I’ve been buying Breyers ice cream, thinking that it really was “ice cream”, which, according to Business Insider (BI), is legally stipulated by the Food and Drug Administration to be this:

In order to qualify as ice cream, a product must meet two criteria:

1. Ice cream must contain a minimum of 10% dairy milkfat.

2. Ice cream must have no more than 100% overrun and weigh no less than 4.5 lbs. per gallon.

But what the heck is “overrun,” you ask? Well overrun is the amount of air that is whipped into the ice cream base during freezing and is usually presented by a percentage. For example, with 100% overrun, for every gallon of ice cream base you would wind up with 2 gallons of finished ice cream.

The more air churned into the ice cream base, the lighter and fluffier the texture. A product with low overrun will be more dense and heavier. The FDA regulates the amount of overrun in ice cream in order to prevent unscrupulous manufacturers from producing and selling an ice cream product that is mainly air instead of cream. (Thanks, U.S. government!)

Now I don’t buy ice cream near as often as I used to, what with watching more carefully the stuff I ingest, but I do look at ice cream in the grocery store, and rarely buy a carton, which I’ve learned to eat directly from the carton with a spoon (not if I have visitors!) rather than put in a bowl, for this method of ingestion reduces intake.  It did tick me off, however, when some ice cream manufacturers, including Breyers, reduced the standard half-gallon carton by 25% to make it 1.5 quarts instead of two. And they did that, as far as I’m concerned, to increase profits, hoping the consumer wouldn’t notice the downsizing. (I wrote them a letter at the time but can’t remember the reply.)

Now, when I went shopping today, I noticed that many of the flavors of Breyers didn’t have “ice cream” written on the cartons. “Were they really ice cream?”, I asked myself. Well, you have to look closely to see, as in this one:

And there, written in small letters at the bottom, it says “frozen dairy dessert”. That’s not legally ice cream. Flavor after flavor I looked at said that, though a few flavors did say “ice cream”.

What’s the difference?  As BI notes, “Anything with less than 10% milkfat and/or more than 100% overrun cannot use the term ‘ice cream’ officially, hence the designation of ‘frozen dairy dessert’.”

Well, most consumers aren’t going to inspect the top for that designation, I suspect. And I wondered how many of Breyers’s products are real ice cream versus “frozen dairy desserts”. BI says this:

A company may sell multiple types of dairy-based products from line to line. For example, Breyers sells both ice cream (their original “Natural” line) and frozen dairy desserts (the entirety of the Breyers Blasts! line), which include many of the candy flavors like Reese’s.

So I googled “Breyers Ice Cream”, looking for real ice cream, and found this link (click on screenshot to go to site):

And it takes you a page that includes this (and more flavors):


I would have thought these were all ice cream since they’re on the linked page, and the bit at the top implies to me that they’re ice cream (“we start with fresh cream”, etc.).

But they’re not. You have to click on each flavor to find out if it’s “ice cream” or “frozen dairy dessert”.  Here’s a real ice cream:

And here’s a frozen dairy dessert:

Sometimes you can’t even tell from the description, but have to click on the “See nutrition facts, ingredients, and more arrow” to find out. Here’s one that used to be a staple for me:

But if you click on the arrow, you see this:

So caveat emptor: read the carton if you’re looking for real ice cream (I realize that it won’t make a difference to many readers). There were a surprisingly large number of “frozen dairy desserts” on the page you get when you click on the “Breyers Ice Cream” link shown above.

When I buy ice cream now, and I don’t know when I will, I’ll stick to real ice cream, some of the small gourmet types like Ben & Jerry’s, or a local staple, Blue Bunny (made in Iowa), which proudly bears “Ice Cream” on its carton. (And yes, I know that once Blue Bunny “Cookie Dough” Ice Cream was recalled because of Listeria contamination.) And even Blue Bunny has downsizing: this one’s 46 ounces, others are the now standard 48 ounces (1.5 quarts).

Blue Bunny doesn’t mess around, and although they have “lite” ice cream, the vast bulk of their product is the real thing, and I absolutely love their “double strawberry”: strawberry ice cream with big pieces of strawberry in it as well as swirls of strawberry sauce. It comes in the 48 ounce tub.

So get off my lawn with your “frozen dairy desserts”!

In light of Barcelona, what, if anything, do we do about immigration?

August 19, 2017 • 11:15 am

I don’t think there’s any number of Islamist terrorist attacks that will make people stop and think about the issue of immigration, which allows the entry of some people likely (or sworn) to commit such attacks. Indeed, I am leary of trying to curb refugees into Europe or the U.S., for, at least in the U.S., immigration is the lifeblood of our country. But the mere suggestion that we examine immigration or screen immigrants has become taboo, and may be ineffectual anyway given that many Muslims living in Europe or the U.S. have already lived there a while, with many being citizens.

Over at Areo, A. R. Devine does see a problem, and discusses it in his frank article “After Barcelona: Let the denial and excuses begin.” (Devine is identified as “a writer and published author. He won the Orwell Prize in 2010 for his blog, ‘Working with the Underclass,’ written under the nom de plume of Winston Smith.”) Here Devine expresses the dilemma that many of us face, as our progressive liberalism conflicts with the knowledge that a regressive religion has an extremist wing that kills innocent people and is “hostile to liberal ideas”:

The Jeremy Corbyns, Ken Livingstones, Cenk Uygurs, and Sally Kohns of this world and many of their supporters will grasp at anything but admit the truth that the Islamic faith has a problem with both violent and nonviolent extremism. When you want to talk about Islamic extremism they will bring up the fact that all religions have their extremists. This is undoubtedly true, but there is a qualitative difference between an extreme Mormon and his strange underwear collection and a Wahhabi hate preacher who believes Western women are whores who should be driven over and maimed beneath the axles of a speeding van.

An extremist Christian will go on an anti-abortion march, scream at you about the fiery depths of hell, and then go home and pray for sinners (yes, in some cases, they’ll do much worse). An extremist Buddhist will meditate too much and bore you to death about karma. An extremist Hindu will definitely kick your ass if you try to eat his cow. However, there is only one religion where its extremists (and there are many as it’s a spectrum) believe some or all of the following: gay people should be killed (happens in many Islamic countries at the hands of the state or a mob), those who wish to leave Islam should be killed or imprisoned (the law in several Muslim countries), and women should be stoned to death for sex outside marriage.

And we have invited a fair amount of individuals who hold these attitudes into Europe, courtesy of our immigration policies over the last few years. It’s not all, certainly not, anyone who says that is clueless. But it’s enough that we are seeing problems and attacks erupting around Europe. The challenge is confronting and changing these attitudes without sliding into bigotry.

Devine doesn’t offer a solution but does make two observations: that European politicians are largely ignoring the problem, and at their peril; and that there’s a general failure among liberals to discuss frankly the terrorism that’s plaguing Europe:

And because some European politicians have provided little to no screening and have not efficiently regulated the numbers migrating from the Islamic world, with each terror attack bigotry and hatred towards the genuine moderate Muslims will grow — which I utterly condemn. I worry that not dealing with this issue honestly will not bode well for sentiments against liberal and secular Muslims. So, well done to Angela Merkel and the EU for all of this.

And this:

Over the next few days, before the bodies in Barcelona are laid to rest, the legions of  self-hating Western apologists will spend most of their anger either denying the problem or blaming the West for these attacks.

I read one post on social media. It was written by the type of person who had harped on continuously about Charlottesville for the past few days. But when it came to Barcelona, they described these attacks as nothing but a footnote in the weekly news that should be given less attention. I doubt the victim’s families see the murders of their loved ones as nothing to cause a fuss about.

Or ignoring the issue. Horrible as the violence in Charlottesville was, it’s not comparable to what’s going on repeatedly in Europe (a second attack was foiled in Spain after five perpetrators were killed, but now a Moroccan man has stabbed two Finns to death and injured ten in Turku, Finland, and it’s being investigated as a “terrorist attack.”  No country in the West, it seems, is immune. HuffPo has six stories on the front page related to Charlottesville, and a buried one on Turku, but nothing on Spain. Some “Leftist” bloggers I follow who put up post after post about Nazis and Charlottesville, haven’t said a word about the attack in Barcelona.

Is it “whataboutery” to fault people for concentrating on Charlottesville and largely ignoring what’s happening in Europe? Part of that is certainly due to the well known parochialism of Americans, who are either ignorant of or don’t care much about what happens overseas. But Devine is right: part of it is an attempt to deliberately ignore religiously-inspired terrorism because it conflicts with a Regressive Left narrative: people of color are to be excused because they’ve been oppressed, and the oppression is simply the West’s (or white mens’) fault. To me, no matter what the West did—and we did intrude in bad ways in the Middle East—that’s not an excuse for the terrorist murder of innocent people. After all, the value of an American life is no different from the value of a Finnish or Spanish life. If we’re truly liberal, our concern shouldn’t stop at the U.S. border.

Yet I have no solution, and I invite readers to tell me what they’d do were they in charge of immigration to Europe or the U.S. Would you screen people? If so, how?

I asked one diehard liberal friend, who knows a bit about foreign affairs, to say what he/she thought about what to do. The response didn’t provide a solution but did raise a red flag:

“Nation states need definable, controllable borders. EU leaders implicitly refuse to recognize this. The elections in EU countries this year may be the last in which centrists (eg, Macron and Merkel) win.  But four or five years from now?”

Caturday felid trifecta: Snow leopard cubs in Toronto; cat mayor of Alaskan town dies; cat gently pets tiny frog

August 19, 2017 • 10:00 am

Today’s trifecta includes a nice video of a rare snow leopard (Panthera uncia) with her two adorable cubs in the Toronto zoo. Sadly, there were originally three cubs but one died of pneumonia. Listen to their little squeaks! And look at mom’s tail!

They’re now three months old, and, fingers crossed, will grow up to be among the world’s most beautiful wild cats. It’s a great pity that these animals are confined in zoos. One could say that studying them there will help conserve them in the wild, but I don’t find that argument convincing, nor do I think that people seeing the cat will be moved to engage in conservation efforts.

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Several readers sent me notices of the death of Stubbs, the mayor of the tiny town of Talkeetna, Alaska (population 900). Stubbs was a cat, and, according to the CBC, was elected the real mayor in a town vote in 1998 (there’s no human mayor).  As the CBC reported on July 25:

The animal’s owners announced the cat’s death late Saturday [July 22] in a statement.

“Stubbs lived for 20 years and 3 months,” the family wrote.

“He was a trooper until the very last day of his life; meowing at us throughout the day to pet him or to come sit on the bed with him and let him snuggle and purr for hours in our lap. Thank you, Stubbs, for coming into our lives for the past 31 months; you are a remarkable cat and we will dearly miss you. We loved the time we were allowed to spend with you.”

According to Stubb’s family, Mayor Stubbs, as the cat was most commonly known, went to bed Thursday and died overnight, KTVA-TV reports.

Stubbs lived in the local general store where he became a tourist attraction. He has his own Wikipedia page, which reports another true fact:

Every afternoon, Stubbs went to a nearby restaurant and drank water laden with catnip out of a wineglass or margarita glass.

Here he is having his restorative:


And in his usual position:

Stubbs’s life had its rough spots:

On August 31, 2013, Stubbs was attacked by a dog. He was placed under heavy sedation at a veterinary hospital 70 miles away in Wasilla [JAC: former home of Sarah Palin], having suffered a punctured lung, a fractured sternum, and a deep wound in his side. A crowd-funding page was set up to help pay his medical bills. Stubbs remained in the veterinary hospital for nine days before returning to the upstairs room of the general store; he was subsequently discouraged from roaming. Donations toward his care were received from around the world; the surplus was given to an animal shelter and to the local veterinary clinic.

Other perils Stubbs escaped from included being shot by teenagers with BB guns and falling into a restaurant’s deep fryer (which was switched off and cool at the time). Other exploits included having hitched a ride to the outskirts of Talkeetna on a garbage truck.

I visited Talkeetna in April, 2006 to debate creationist Hugh Ross (the last such debate I’ll do) at the annual meeting of the Alaska Bar Association. Being lawyers, they gave me a generous honorarium, which I vowed to spend traveling a bit around the state. I drove up to Talkeetna, where there’s a decent-sized airport, to catch a bush plane to Mount Denali (former Mt. McKinley). I did know about Stubbs and tried to visit him, but, sadly, the general store was closed. But found a friendly cat at the Talkeetna airport, where I caught a plane that landed on a glacier by Denali. Here’s the cat, whose name I’ve forgotten (ten to one some reader knows it):

Here’s the view of Denali from inside the bush plane (I got to sit next to the pilot):

Our landing spot:

The plane! The plane! (It had to taxi back and forth for half an hour to pack the snow sufficiently to be able to take off again.)

And Denali (left rear) and me (yes, I know this is getting self-aggrandizing, but it was a great adventure, and all on the ABA’s dime):

And here’s Talkeetna’s main street. As you can see, it’s tiny, and serves largely as a jumping-off spot for trips into the bush or mountains:

Although Mayor Stubbs is gone, he had a long life and was well loved. The good news is that the CBC reports that a replacement is being groomed:

Although Stubbs is gone, one of his owners’ kittens might be ready to take up his mayoral mantle.

“Amazingly, Denali has the exact personality as Stubbs,” the family wrote of the kitten. “He loves the attention, he’s like a little puppy when he’s around people. We couldn’t have asked for a better understudy than Denali — he really has followed in Stubbs’ pawprints in just about everything.”

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Finally, here’s a kitten gently petting a tiny frog. I wonder if the frog is toxic, as the cat seems to be repulsed at the end after licking its paw. I don’t know where the meows are coming from.

h/t: Michael