Dead whale explodes

November 29, 2013 • 6:16 am

Warning: GROSS! Do not watch if you can’t take an exploding whale spewing its guts everywhere. (You’ll watch anyway)

I pondered long and hard about putting this up, but decided to because it shows not only the internal organs of a sperm whale, but the tremendous gas pressure that builds up inside a dead cetacean (there are in fact several videos of exploding whales on YouTube). But don’t think this one was killed; according to the notes, it was a washed-up whale that died of “natural causes”:

Sperm Whale explodes in the Faroe Islands while a man is trying to open his stomach. Sperm Whales are not killed in the Faroe Islands, this one died from natural causes..
This footage was originally shot by the Faroese national television. http://www.kvf.fo

Now I’m not sure why the guy was trying to open his stomach, unless they were trying to get ambergris or something, nor why anybody would be foolish enough to attempt this. But reader gravelinspector, who sent me this video, gives some useful answers:

I would have thought that with the prevalence of exploding whale videos on the Internet, people wouldn’t need telling this, but … well it actually looks as if this was a part of a disposal team, with appropriate PPE (Personal protective Equipment). I’d have used a long-handled knife though – probably something for forestry trimming, 6ft long – to vent the problem. At arm’s length. From the upwind side.
We’ve had several of these in the last few years in the Aberdeen area. And boy, do they stink! For a 10-tonne mini-whale, “something” could include a lorry (there is a video warning you to not take the lorry through the middle of a city though – you can guess!), but much bigger than that and you have no real choice but to cut it into pieces there and then.

Readers’ cats: Fatty Boom Boom, Mischief, General Mayhem, and Monster

November 28, 2013 • 3:14 pm

Here is a postprandial moggie with a strange name, replete with Thanksgiving bird and described by staff member Thaddeus Aid.

I just had to defend my turkey dinner from my daughter’s cat. It was a wild tale of the great white hunter stalking his prey. Thankfully my fully cooked bird did not succumb to his prowess.

Later all the cats got to share some of the leftover turkey. The d-g had to subsist on leftover steak.

20131128_212300I got more info on this cat and the others:

The cat’s name is Fatty Boom Boom (my daughter named him through a series of names starting with Parsnip and Hashtag but ending with that, so we didn’t know what he was going to be called for a week or so). The photo is tonight, post hunt and noms.

The other cats are Monster (wife’s cat, named by my son when he was 4), General Mayhem (my cat, though he was purchased as a gift for my wife, also the only cat I have ever not been allergic to), and Mischief (another daughter’s cat). All shared in the turkey bounty.

Here’s General Mayhem:

cats-Mayhem

And Fatty again, with Mischief and Monster:

cats-Fatty-Mischief-Monster

Time for my own bird, and a good bottle of Rioja.  Happy Thanksgiving, folks; I’ll be here all week!

The panda ant

November 28, 2013 • 1:48 pm

Well, it’s not really an ant but a wasp—a wasp in the hymenopteran family Multillidae, also called—for obvious reasons—”velvet ants.” (Ants and wasps are fairly closely related; in fact, ants evolved from early wasps.)

In these wasps the females are wingless and the males winged, and their colors and patterns are aposematic: that is, they are “warning” patterns that tell predators to stay away. Predators presumably learn these patterns readily, for velvet wasps have extremely painful stings.

But isn’t this a cute little girl?

Picture 1
From One Big Photo, with the big photo taken by Chris Lukhaup.

I’m not an expert on this group (or any group of insects save Drosophila), but Wikipedia notes this:

They exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism; the males and females are so different, it is almost impossible to associate the two sexes of a species unless they are captured while mating. In a few species, the male is so much larger than the female, he carries her aloft while mating, which is also seen in the related family Tiphiidae.

Here’s another view, from photo by DrSarahJensen via Flickr:

tumblr_ms8xi8hVeS1rqgazso1_500

Velvet ants come in all sorts of striking colors and patterns, presumably aposematic; go here to see some.

h/t: Grania

Does evolution promote bullying?

November 28, 2013 • 12:24 pm

This letter to the editor, which originally appeared on Twi**er, has been the subject of discussion on reddit, where it’s claimed that the paper is The Lake City Reporter in Florida.  I can’t vouch 100% for its authenticity, but I provisionally judge it as real. For one thing, there’s a “Kenny Merriken” who has a YouTube channel with three hyper-religious videos, including “Messiah loves homosexuals” (have a gander at that one!).

Antievolution letter

There’s two types of Darwinian bullying here: social Darwinism, in which stronger kids are supposedly empowered by evolution to beat up the weaker, and secular bullying, i.e. the removal of the Bible from public school classrooms. Merriken is apparently unaware that the latter “secular bullying” is mandated by the Constitution and settled law.

The whole letter is pretty incoherent, but I suppose small-town papers have to publish every bit of nonsense that comes in as a letter. After all, there’s no downside to publishing nonsense like this.

What I’m learning from the publication of letters like this—and they appear in more respectable papers as well—is that editors feel no responsibility at all to vet letters for outright misrepresentations and lies.

h/t: Barry

Your Thanksgiving viewing

November 28, 2013 • 10:32 am

Instead of watching a postprandial football game in which behemoths injure each other, how about working your neurons a bit and watching this  53-minute talk by physicist Sean Carroll, delivered in Oxford last January? It’s a superb presentation.

The title is “God is not a good theory.” I like that—and the talk—because it presumes that the notion of God really is a theory (in the sense of “an idea about what’s true in the universe”), and not some ineffable idea that can’t be approached via reason and science.

It will give you a lot of good ammunition to respond to those theists who use cosmology or physics as evidence for god. I call that endeavor “The New Natural Theology,” since it’s replaced old creationist claims as the most common “sophisticated” argument for god from observations of nature.

h/t: John Loftus (read his piece at the link)

Man saves squirrel found in bag of mulch

November 28, 2013 • 6:39 am

Since most of us will have our blood diverted from our brain to our stomach today, don’t expect substantive or thought-provoking posts. Here, instead, is a heartwarmer to precede the inevitable heartburn.

Several readers sent me links to this strange but happy story, posted in many places (these picture come from Slightly Viral).

It apparently began in February of this year when a Florida man opened a bag of mulch—organic material laid over the soil to fertilize plants, keep down weeds, and conserve moisture. But this bag of mulch, which looks like it contained wood bits, also contained a baby squirrel. As the site reports:

The baby squirrel appeared to be only days old when he found it.  It was so young, [the man] initially mistook it for a mouse or rat.  But he decided to take care of it, and lucky for us, document his its development.

1-squirrelIt was force-fed, and developed like a champ. Here it is after two weeks:

3-squirrelOne week later, its eyes still closed:

4-squirrelIts eyes opened in the fifth week:

5-squirrelAnd it bonded with its rescuer:

6-squirrel

With a voracious appetite (I can vouch for that in young squirrels), it grew quickly (is that a cookie?):

8-squirrel-1

7-squirrel

Now it’s mature, and the man named it “Zip”:

10-squirrel

I don’t know how it got into a bag of mulch (presumably it fell from a tree, or its mother sequestered it in a mulch factory), but we can give thanks that a kind-hearted man decided to invest a big effort into rearing what some people would see as an annoying rodent.  I can’t help but think that animals like squirrels do value their own lives (they’re evolved to), and we should respect that.

I don’t have any information on Zip’s current state, though some people would try to return such an animal to the wild. Squirrels don’t make the best of pets—they have to be kept in cages much of the time or they’ll chew up your house—but at least Zip got a chance.

In honor of Zip, I’ve given my own (outdoor) squirrels an extra ration of hazelnuts and almonds today, along with fresh water and unsalted sunflower seeds. Winter is coming, and they’ll need food.