A major problem in animal phylogeny seems to have been solved

May 21, 2023 • 9:30 am

As a new article in Nature (title below) notes, there are five major groups of animals that arose early in animal evolution and persist today: ctenophores (comb jellies), sponges (Porifera), placozoans (small, simple multicellular organisms), cnidarians (jellyfish, corals, sea anemones), and bilaterians (all other animals ranging rom molluscs to vertebrates). We have a pretty good notion of when their ancestors branched off from each other in evolution (this is in effect their relatedness, expressed in their phylogeny, or family tree), except for one question:  which group’s ancestors branched off first? That group would be called the “sister group” of all living animals. (It could also be called “the outgroup among all groups of animals”.)

DNA sequencing has shown that it’s either the ctenophores or the sponges (the most common candidate), but it’s been very difficult to decide between the two because there’s been so much time since the ancestors of modern sponges and ctenophores branched off from the other groups—700-800 million years—that too many DNA changes have accumulated to allow a firm DNA-based resolution. (DNA is now the best way to go to resolve these trees.) Every few years then, someone attempts another DNA-based phylogeny of animals, and the outgroup keeps changing between sponges and ctenophores.

Why is this an important question? Not just curiosity alone, for its resolution bears on understanding an important fact: like all other animals except sponges, ctenophores have nerves and muscles. This would seem to show that ctenophores are grouped with the other animals, while sponges branches off early, and then nerves and muscles evolved in the ancestor of all other animals.  This convinced many that sponges were the outgroup. If ctenophores, on the other hand, were the sister outgroup that branched off first, that would leave us with a puzzle: why are sponges the one exception, lacking nerves and muscles, among all other animals?  Here are the two possibilities for the outgroups, with “N&M” showing where nerves and muscles evolved. (I’ve put the dots and “N&M” stuff in myself.)

A.  Ctenophore outgroup: The ancestor of ALL animals did have nerves and muscles, but sponges lost them.

or

B.  Sponge outgroup: Nerves and muscles evolved after the ancestor of sponges had branched off from the ancestor of all other animals. (No loss of already-evolved characters required.)

The left side shows “A”, with the common ancestor of all animals having nerves and muscles, but then they were lost in the ancestor of living sponges. The right side shows possibility “B,” with the ancestor of all living animals (red dot) lacking nerves and muscles, which appeared later in the common ancestor of all living animals after that ancestor had branched off from the ancestor of sponges.

As you can see, “A” posits two evolutionary events: the evolution of nerves and muscles in the ancestor of all living animals, and then their loss in the sponge lineage, while “B” posits nerves and muscles evolving evolving just once: in the ancestor of all non-sponge animals.

However, if “A” is the case, you could posit another scenario in which ctenophores independently evolved nerves and muscles from other groups of animals, while the ancestor of all animals lacked them.

The diagram below shows a common ancestor of all animals (red dot) lacking nerves and muscles, and then they evolved twice independently: in ctenophores, and then also in the other groups that branched off later from the common ancestor with sponges. Thus, if A is correct and ctenophores are the outgroup, there are still two explanations for the nerve/muscle presence in animals: either they were in the ancestor of all living animals and then lost in the ancestor of sponges, or they didn’t occur in the animal ancestor but then evolved twice independently (N&M shown where the evolution happened). As you can see, if the red-dot ancestor lacked nerves and muscles, but all modern animals save sponges have them, AND ctenophores were the sister group, then nerves and muscles must have evolved twice OR (as you see above), all early animals had them but the ancestor of sponges lost them. So the left side of the diagram above OR the diagram below show the two evolutionary possibilities for where muscles and nerves occur.

This is why resolving the outgroup is important: it leads to different hypotheses about how evolution worked. Again, the alternatives are A with the ctenophore outgroup, in which cases nerves and muscles were either lost in sponges or evolved twice independently; or B, with the sponge outgroup, in which case nerves and muscles evolved just once—in the common ancestor of all other animals.  Because “B” seems more parsimonious to many, that has been the consensus scenario.

But now the consensus seems wrong: new data show pretty convincingly that ctenophores do appear to be the outgroup, and sponges are more closely related to all other living animals than are ctenophores.  You can read about this by clicking on the screenshot below, or going to the pdf here (reference at bottom).

 

The analysis was very clever. Instead of just looking at large amounts of DNA in the animals, they looked at the order of DNA sequences (genes) on the chromosomes.  Over the last 800 million years, that DNA has been shuffled around as chromosome fuse or bits of chromosomes come loose and stick to other chromosomes (translocations).  In either case, chunks of DNA then get shuffled around among chromosomes and on a given chromosome by inversions.

But this gives us a way to see which groups have undergone unique fusion/translocations and shuffling events, for once this takes place in a common ancestor, it is unlikely to be undone by a reversal of all the processes that lead to genes being ordered as they are now.  Thus, if you see a group of animals that share a common gene order different from that of another lineage, you can be pretty sure that that group is more closely related to each other than to that other lineage.

And that’s what the authors did: they not only sequenced or took sequences from entire genomes of all the animal lineages above (including two species of ctenophores), but ordered genes along chromosomes. (This isn’t hard to do: you get the DNA as a sequence, and the DNA sequence on one chromosome will not run on to the DNA sequence on another chromosome.)  They not only looked at all animal lineages, but also single-celled groups that are less closely related to animals, like amoebas and choanoflagellates (these aren’t considered “animals” but whose ancestors are considered outgroups to all living animals).

The results were pretty unequivocal: they found several chunks of DNA that were shared by the single-celled relatives and ctenophores, but also four ordered chunks of genes that were shared by all living multicellular animals except for ctenophores.  That is, sponges shared gene chunks with vertebrates, cnidarians, and placozoans, but those chunks were in completely different places in the ctenophores.

The conclusion: the chunks found their shared locations in modern animals after they had already branched off from the ancestor of modern ctenophores. Ctenophores are thus the outgroup, and we’re less closely related to them than to sponges. The scenario in A above is the correct one.  (The three groups at the top of the diagram below are single-celled non-animal organisms that are distantly related to animals.) As you see, the ctenophores branched off from all other living animals before any other animal group, making them less closely related to modern animals than are sponges.

Now this analysis may be wrong, but given the irreversibility of moving gene chunks around repeatedly, shared gene chunks on chromosomes almost certainly means shared ancestry. I’m pretty confident, then, that this paper has resolved the long-standing controversy about the “outgroup” of all animals.

But this leaves us, of course, with two questions.  Did the ancestor of all living animals have muscles and nerves, and sponges simply lost them, or did nerves and muscles evolve twice independently?

Each of these comes with another puzzle. The first one is this: why did sponges have complex and highly evolved set of features to sense the environment and move about, but then lost it?  The second one is even more puzzling: how could such complex features evolve twice independently?

UPDATE: I forgot about this but was reminded. Another trait shared by ctenophores and all other animals save sponges is the gut:  a digestive channel formed by “gastrulation”—invagination of the embryo.  Thus we have to account for the disappearance of three features in sponges or the independent evolution of guts, nerves, AND muscles.

While we know that the best information we have is scenario “A” above, we don’t know whether sponges lost their gear or that gear evolved twice independently.  The authors of the paper don’t discuss this, but in a NYT article on the piece by Carl Zimmer, he finds a hint that nerves and muscles may have evolved independently in ctenophores and in all other animals that have them:

Instead, researchers are looking now to comb jellies to see how similar and different their nervous systems are from those of other animals. Recently, Maike Kittelmann, a cell biologist at Oxford Brookes University, and her colleagues froze comb jelly larvae so that they could get a microscopic look at their nervous system. What they saw left them baffled.

Throughout the animal kingdom, neurons are typically separated from one another by tiny gaps called synapses. They can communicate across the gap by releasing chemicals.

But when Dr. Kittelmann and her colleagues started to inspect the comb jelly neurons, they struggled to find a synapse between the neurons. “At that point, we were like, ‘This is curious,’” she said.

In the end, they failed to find any synapses between them. Instead, the comb jelly nervous system forms one continuous web.

When Dr. Kittelmann and her colleagues reported their findings last month, they speculated yet another possibility for the origin of animals. Comb jellies may have evolved their own weird nervous system independently of other animals, using some of the same building blocks.

Dr. Kittelmann and her colleagues are now inspecting other species of comb jellies to see if that idea holds up. But they won’t be surprised to be surprised again. “You have to assume nothing,” she said.

That is, there are differences between the nerves in ctenophores and in all other nerve-bearing animals: the former appear to lack synapses. This suggests that nerves could have evolved independently, and taken two routes, one route lacking a gap (the synapse) between the nerves.  As for the muscles, neither the paper nor Zimmer deals with whether there’s some fundamental differences between how muscles are structured or how they work between ctenophores on the one hand and all other muscle-bearing animals on the other.

As usual, we’ve probably settled one evolutionary question but it’s raised several others. People now will be devoting more attention to nerves and muscles in animals.

As one of my friends, who teaches introductory biology in a major university, said, “Well, I guess I’ll have to revise my lecture notes. For years I’ve been telling students that while the outgroup of all animals isn’t known for sure, it is most likely the sponges.”

Here’s a ctenophore shown on Wikipedia. They are really cool animals, and if you want to see a bunch of them, go to the Monterey Aquarium in California, where they have a mesmerizing display:

 

________________

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 21, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today is Sunday, which is Themed Bird Photos by John Avise Day. Today we celebrate corvids; John’s narrative and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Crows and Ravens

American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are two widespread and well-known North American members of the family Corvidae.  Because both species are medium-sized and all black in plumage, they can be somewhat difficult to distinguish from one another.

But the Raven is larger-bodied, scruffier around the head and neck, and has a wedge-shaped rather than squared-off tail (most evident in flight).  The two species also differ in their vocalizations, with the Crow issuing clean “Cah Cahs” while the Raven issues more throaty “Kraaahs or Brrrocks”.

This week’s photos, all taken in Southern California or Wyoming, compare some different views of these two close cousins.  Crows and Ravens may not be the most beautiful of birds, butthey certainly seem to be among the most intelligent.

American Crow:

Another American Crow:

American Crow in flight:

American Crow holding a feather:

Yet another American Crow:

Flock of American Crows coming in to roost:

Common Raven:

Another Common Raven:

Common Raven in flight:

Another Common Raven in flight:

Common Raven head portrait:

Mobbing a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):

Crooning pair of Common Ravens:

Fight silhouettes of a Common Raven chasing an American Crow:

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 21, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings on the Sabbath, the onemade for Christian cats: it’s Sunday, May 21, 2023, and National Strawberries and Cream Day. Try this recipe: roasted strawberries with crème fraîche  and flaky sea salt (you can use sour cream):

It’s also International Tea Day, National Waiters and Waitresses Day, Rapture Party Day, Stepmother’s Day (but which stepmother?), World Baking Day, Saint Helena Day, celebrating the discovery of Saint Helena in 1502, and World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I am happy about this news: President Biden, who had refused to hand over sophisticated F-16 American-made fighter jets to Ukraine, has changed his mind, and now will allow Ukrainian pilots to train in the jets. Zelensky has been asking for these planes for months.

Now Mr. Biden, who in February rejected F-16 fighter jets as unnecessary, met in Hiroshima on Friday with leaders of other major democracies and told them that he would allow Ukrainian pilots to be trained on the American-made warplanes. He added that in a few months, the allies would figure out how to begin delivering modern Western fighters to a Ukrainian force struggling to keep an aging, dwindling fleet of pieced-together, Soviet-made fighters in the air.

It all raises the question: Are there any conventional weapons in the American or NATO arsenals that the president would not, eventually, provide to Ukraine?

Washington’s pattern of saying no before saying yes has repeated itself enough times over the past 15 months that Ukrainian officials say they now know to ignore the first answer and keep pressing. But White House officials say the shifting positions reflect not indecision, but changing circumstances — and changing assumptions about the risks involved.

“When it comes to the question of escalation, of course, the United States government is a learning organism,” Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said on Saturday morning in Hiroshima. “This conflict has been dynamic. It has unfolded over time.” So, he said, Mr. Biden’s decisions have kept up with Ukraine’s changing needs.

In the weeks after the invasion, the teetering Ukrainian government needed Stinger missiles and other anti-tank systems. When the war shifted to the south and the east of the country, with big open plains, they needed artillery and air defenses — and 155-millimeter howitzer shells. And while Mr. Biden does not believe fighter jets will play an important role in the conflict for a while, providing them is part of thinking about how to defend Ukraine for the long term — after the current phase of the war is over.

Well, I understood it would take at leaast a year, and probably more, to train Ukrainian pilots in the F-16s. Let’s hope the planes are still needed when the pilots are ready to fly. But it’s too late for the city of Bakhmut, which, Zelensky claims, has been completely destroyed, even as he argues that it’s not completely in the hands of the Russians.

*Speaking of the planes, the Russians don’t like Biden’s announcement at all, and have made threats about Biden’s gesture.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister has warned Western countries of “enormous risks” if Ukraine is provided with F-16 fighter jets, Russian state media TASS reported Saturday.

The comments come after US President Joe Biden gave his backing for Ukrainian pilots to be trained to fly F-16s, reversing his previous position.

F-16s are considered high performance weapon systems with a range of 500 miles (860 kilometers), and would be an upgrade to the aircraft currently in Ukraine’s fleet.

Responding to the move, Alexander Grushko said: “We see that the Western countries are still adhering to the escalation scenario.

“It involves enormous risks for themselves. In any case, this will be taken into account in all our plans, and we have all the necessary means to achieve the set goals.”

*The issue on which Republicans are most vulnerable is, of course, abortion. Despite a hefty majority of Americans agreeing with the stipulations of the now-overturned Roe v. Wade decision, Republicans have rushed to get abortions banned nearly completely. Now they’re starting to realize that they made a mistake.

Immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican lawmakers were quick to embrace so-called “trigger” bans designed to take effect as soon as the decision was released, while others rushed to pass additional restrictions that would halt the procedure in their states, sometimes backing proposals that did not include exceptions for rape or incest.

Now, almost a year later, lawmakers in some Republican-led states have started coalescing behind bans that allow most abortions to continue — a reaction, some Republicans say, to the sustained political backlash to abortion restrictions that has been mounting since the landmark decision in June.

While the 12-week bans have so far only passed in two states — North Carolina and Nebraska — the proposal has also gained traction with some national antiabortion groups who say they’re supportive of restricting abortions as far as a state can, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which has also been pushing for, at minimum, national limits on abortion at 15 weeks.

But the approach has drawn sharp criticism from others in the antiabortion movement, who argue the 12 or 15 week bans don’t do enough to stop what they see as widespread murder, allowing more than 90 percent of abortions to continue. Some Republican lawmakers and antiabortion advocates remain adamant that the only path forward is to aim to eradicate abortion completely nationwide.

How voters respond to these new bans could impact how abortion plays out as an issue in the 2024 presidential election. With little polling on the 12 week proposals, it’s unclear whether voters will buy Republican arguments that these kinds of bans are a “main

Twelve weeks is three months: one trimester. And abortions during that period were legal under Roe v Wade. I favor a standard even laxer than Roe, but at least 12 weeks is twice as long as the period beyond which abortion is banned in “fetal heartbeat” states.

*Martin Amis, novelist and bet buddy of Christopher Hitchens, died at the young age (my age!) of 73. And I bet he smoked, because he sure drank and died of the same disease that killed Hitch:

Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private life made him tabloid fodder himself, died on Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Fla. He was 73.

His wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was esophageal cancer — the same disease that killed his close friend and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens in 2011.

Mr. Amis published 15 novels, a well-regarded memoir (“Experience,” in 2000), works of nonfiction, and collections of essays and short stories. In his later work he investigated Stalin’s atrocities, the war on terror and the legacy of the Holocaust.

He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — “Money: A Suicide Note” (1985), “London Fields” (1990) and “The Information” (1995) — which remain, along with his memoir, his most representative and admired work.

. . . Mr. Amis’s literary heroes — he called them his “Twin Peaks” — were Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, and critics located in his work both Nabokov’s gift for wordplay and gamesmanship and Bellow’s exuberance and brio.

I just remembered that I have an autographed novel by Amis fis, though I can’t remember where I got it. I haven’t read it, either.

I have a collection of books autographed by luminaries I’ve met over the years, and looking through them to find the Amis novel, I once again encountered my first edition of The Double Helix by Jim Watson. I found it for only nine bucks in a dusty bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, and immediately snapped it up. They didn’t know what they had!  Later, when I chatted with Watson, I asked him to autograph it, and he did so, adding my name. Looking online, I now see that this book, autographed and in good condition with the original dustcover, is worth between five and eight thousand bucks!  When I die it will be thrown out, so I should either sell it or donate it to a library. But what library cares about whether a donated book is autographed? But I was happy I recognized the first edition, and it’s in near-pristine condition.

*From Jez: An article in the Guardian describes how a couple in Essex sued after 18 water buffaloes escaped from a nearby farm, rampaged through their garden, and eight of them fell into the swimming pool. The damage was extensive.

An Essex couple have spent 10 months seeking compensation after 18 escaped water buffaloes stampeded through their garden, with eight of them taking a morning dip in their new swimming pool.

Andy and Lynette Smith, who are retired, say that their garden and pool were ruined after the animals, which weigh about 600kg each, got out of a rare breeds farm and on to their property, causing more than £25,000 worth of damage.

Eight of them ended up falling into the £70,000 pool, triggering a stampede that wrecked fencing and flower beds. The animals were rescued unharmed by the farmer.

The incident happened when an electric fence failed last July, allowing the herd to breach a wooden fence and hedge separating their field from the Smiths’ garden.

“When my wife went to make the morning tea, she glanced out of the kitchen window and saw eight buffaloes in the pool,” said Andy Smith. “She called 999 and was told the fire brigade don’t accept hoax calls. It took some persuading to get them to take us seriously. When they arrived, one of the buffaloes, spooked by their hi-vis jackets, headed straight at them.”

“Buffaloes are top-heavy and the porcelain tiles round the pool were slippery so they lost their grip and once they were in they couldn’t get out again,” said Smith. “The previous afternoon, we had had hosted a pool party for our young grandchildren and their friends. If the invasion had happened hours earlier, it could have been very serious.”

The farm’s insurer, NFU Mutual, accepted liability, but failed to agree a settlement for nearly a year.

“This pool was our retirement luxury bought when I sold the business, which I’d spent years building up. It was earned by a lot of sweat and toil, but after the buffaloes’ swim it was leaking 75 gallons a day and was unusable.”

However, after being contacted by the Guardian, the insurer eventually agreed to cover the full £25,000 repair bill.

NFU Mutual sucks!  They wouldn’t even pay the damages until after the Guardian contacted them. Buffaloes creating havoc!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is educating Andrzej in feline ornithology:

Hili: Try to look at this bird from a different perspective.
A: What perspective?
Hili: A feline one.
In Polish:
Hili: Spróbuj spojrzeć na tego ptaka z innej perspektywy.
Ja: Z jakiej?
Hili: Z kociej perspektywy.

. . . and a picture of the affectionate Szaron. I used to cuddle him on this couch:

********************

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Beth:

From Masih. The execution of three protestors in Iran has triggered more demonstrations:

From Malcolm, who would like one of these tables. So would I, but they aren’t going to be cheap!

From gravelinspector. The “Harlem Hellfighters” are new to me (read the whole tweet):

From Barry: a tapir smiles for the camera:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a whole family exterminated:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who is now back in Manchester, just in time to see Man City throw it all away (or so he says).  The first one he’s captioned as “Lucky fish, cross eagle”:

This is the thought we both have when we see something like this. Matthew sez: ” “And all this is somewhere in their tiny heads, in intricate neural and chemical networks, and ultimately in their genes! Amazing!”

And a very pampered kitty!:

A question: What is “gender-affirming care”?

May 20, 2023 • 1:00 pm

I have a serious question, and no, I’m not a Republican or a Nazi for asking it.  According to the Associated Press, 17 states have restricted or banned “gender-affirming care”:

At least 17 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors, though judges have temporarily blocked their enforcement in some, including Arkansas. An Associated Press analysis found that often those bills sprang not from grassroots or constituent demand, but from the pens of a handful of conservative interest groups.

Many of the proposals, as introduced or passed, are identical or very similar to some model legislation, the AP found. Those ready-made bills have been used in statehouses for decades, often with criticisms of carpetbagging by out-of-state interests. In the case of restrictions on gender-affirming care for youths, they allow a handful of far-right groups to spread a false narrative based on distorted science, critics say.

The “distorted science” appears to be mainly the claim that puberty blockers are unsafe. But in fact their safety is in question, and so that’s not “distorted science.”

We don’t know their long-term effects, we know they do have some inimical effects, and at any rate the lack of good long-term data has impelled several European countries to allow blockers to be used only in experimental clinical trials.

Below is what my understanding of “gender-affirming care” includes. I may be wrong, and I haven’t read the bills. but my understanding of the procedure doesn’t make me rush to assure everybody that it’s fine, and that only transphobes would support them.  To me this brand of care involves two primary ways of treating a gender-dysphoric child:

  1. My view was that “gender-affirming care” involved not a therapeutic probing of gender-dysphoric children to see if they may have been gay, and to generally explore their dysphoria—a rather long process of therapy—but rather a rush to affirm a child’s conclusion, or the conclusions of their parents, that the he or she feels as if they were in the wrong body. Instead, I thought “gender-affirming care” was what its name implied: not empathic but objective therapy, but rather a rush to affirm what the child or its parents had already concluded about gender.
  2. I also thought that “gender-affirming care” involved a willingness to use puberty blockers, and use them soon: in some cases they’ve been prescribed after just the first visit to a doctor or therapist.

It’s worth considering whether at least these two aspects of  gender-affirming care should indeed be banned for the time being.  No child’s word should be accepted without question by a therapist, especially when irrevocable medical changes can depend on whether that word is accepted uncritically. There is general agreement that gender dysphoria will resolve one way or the other (often the child becomes gay) without dangerous hormonal or surgical treatment, so why the rush??

Further, I agree with the Europeans that the use of long-term puberty blockers should be considered experimental, not just an off-label use, which is how they’re used in America.  They should not be prescribed except in clinical trials—something that the Europeans, more cautious than we in this matter—have decided.

Now there may be other aspects of these bills banning gender-affirming care that go beyond this, and to which I’d object. But the two behaviors above—banning “immediate acceptance therapy” and prescribing puberty blockers willy-nilly—are, in my view, worth halting pending further data.

Until we know that puberty blockers are safe for long-term use, and absolutely reversible, they should not be prescribed except in clinical trials, and not to the general public.  These are used either at the onset of puberty or before it begins, and a child is in no position to make a decision about its gender at that age. I’m not sure what age should be the cutoff, but surely no younger than 18. We can argue about that after the medical data are in.

And yes, I’m prepared to think that conservatives who propose these bills are doing so not solely out of medical and therapeutic considerations, but to go along with their tribe, perhaps out of a general dislike of transgender people. That is thoughtless and unempathic.

Nevertheless, I might be willing to go along with some aspects of these bans, not on political grounds, but rather on medical grounds and out of concern of the well-being of children and adolescents.

But my ignorance of these 17 bills is profound, so please enlighten me. What kind of “gender-affirming care” do they ban? Do they spell it out clearly?

Caturday felid trifecta: Cats in the U.S. Navy; are cats liquids? ; how to call a cat; and lagniappe

May 20, 2023 • 9:30 am

This article from Insider gives a brief history of cats on ships, and has a lot of cool photos of maritime moggies. Click to read (excerpted text is indented)

Much of the information comes from Scot Christenson,  director of communications for the US Naval Institute and the author of “Cats in the Navy.”

British, French, and Spanish explorers in the late-15th century carried cats to the Americas upon the discovery of the “new world” during the age of exploration.

The animals were so universally revered that local islanders visited by British trading ships would often sneak onboard the ships to try and steal a cat for themselves, Christenson said.

During the Age of Sail, from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century, rats were known to leave an easily-ignitable trail of gunpowder aboard wooden ships as they scurried across the deck, posing a risk to the sailors on board, Christenson said, and cats could help stop the rodents in their tracks.

Even in the modern era, rats and mice remained an inherent danger to many ships, spreading disease, chewing through sails, and eating food supplies, according to Christenson

“But cats are effective predators,” he told Insider.

. . .Cats were considered akin to crew members aboard the British Royal Navy, according to Christenson.

Some sailors would bond so closely with a cat that they would bring the animal home with them at the end of a voyage.

When the US Navy was founded in the 18th century, the military branch borrowed certain customs from its British predecessor, including a penchant for seafaring cats.

Long believed to be powerful and spiritual animals, cats served as omens and portents among early sailors, according to Christenson.

The Japanese believed cats could protect their ships from evil spirits, Christenson told Insider.

Sailors around the globe also believed that a cat’s behavior could predict the outcome of a voyage.

If a cat jumped on board a ship prior to setting sail, seaman believed their vessel would be protected on its journey. But if a cat deserted a boat ahead of its departure, sailors thought themselves doomed, according to Christenson.

The worst sign of all was the sight of two cats fighting on the pier ahead of a sailing, which some sailors interpreted as the devil and angel fighting for their souls, Christenson said.

Sailors initially believed cats were in control of their fate, Christenson said. The animals were thought to have a gale inside their tail because they would begin shaking during storms.

Sailors interpreted this behavior as angry cats calling down foul weather.

Seamen later discovered that moody cats weren’t in fact conjuring storms, instead, they were responding to the physical agitation they felt when the air pressure around them would drop.

Sailors started to watch cats’ mannerisms to detect coming storms.

The animals are also sensitive to high-pitched whines, so cats helped Navy sailors detect coming air crafts during the World Wars, Christenson said.

Feline members of the Royal Navy received a weekly allowance, which the sailors often paid themselves, contributing one shilling and sixpence to buy treats and milk for their cat friends, Christenson said.

The extra snacks helped make sure the cats were sustained on board even after they had caught all the rodents.

During World War I, the US Navy scooped up hundreds of thousands of stray cats and assigned them to ships, Christenson said.

. . . The animals would typically stay on the same boat for long periods at a time, becoming territorial over their space. But every once in a while, a cat would jump ship if they determined they could get better food options on another boat, even if it was with another country’s navy, according to Christenson.

The smartest cats claimed control of the ship’s galley where they received extra treats and grew extra fat. Other felines opted to spend time in a boat’s laundry room where there were plentiful soft and warm items on which to sleep.

Budget cuts after World War II dealt a death knell to Navy cats, Christenson said.

Advocates for the financial cuts ridiculed the Navy, accusing the military branch of complaining about a lack of funds while planning birthday parties for their cats.

The public relations aspect of the campaign embarrassed the Navy, even though more often than not, it was the sailors themselves paying for the upkeep of their feline friends.

But it was updated quarantine laws that ultimately led to the end of cats’ seafaring days, according to Christenson.

For years, Navy cats were granted special permission to forgo most country’s standard laws that required incoming private citizens to quarantine their accompanying cats and other pets for several months.

But as nations began cracking down on animal quarantine laws in the aftermath of World War II, ship captains faced serious repercussions if one of their boat’s felines escaped and went exploring in a port city, Christenson said, leading to the demise of the practice altogether.

And a story:

Christenson spent years collecting stories of the cats who served in the Navy.

Of all the cases he found, his favorite anecdote is the tale of “Mis Hap.”

Mis Hap was a tiny kitten found by a Marine [Frank Praytor] during the Korea War, Christenson told Insider. The animal had just been orphaned, and her human rescuer named her Mis Hap because she had “been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The Marine was photographed feeding the cat with a medicine dropper in a heartrending photo that was picked up by dozens of newspapers around the globe, according to Christenson.

Prior to Mis Hap’s discovery, the Marine in question was at risk of being court-martialed after submitting one of his own photographs of wounded Marines to a photo contest, flouting military censors that had banned the publication of such content at the time.

But the marine’s newfound newspaper fame ultimately spared him from the charges and yielded hundreds of marriage proposals from women across the country who were moved by his tender care toward Mis Hap, according to Christenson.

Mis Map went on to become the mascot of headquarters in Korea.

Her Marine eventually brought her back to Chicago where she lived a long, happy life.

A video of Mis Hap and her marine. The story has a twist to it (but no worries: the cat was fine):

This is indeed a photo of Mis Hap and Frank Praytor. He became famous for this photograph:

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A liquid is traditionally defined as a material that adapts its shape to fit a container. Yet under certain conditions, cats seem to fit this definition. This somewhat paradoxical observation emerged on the web a few years ago and joined the long list of internet memes involving our feline friends. When I first saw this question it made me laugh, and then think. I decided to reformulate it to illustrate some problems at the heart of rheology, the study of the deformations and flows of matter. My study on the rheology of cats won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.

The prizes are awarded every year by Improbable Research, an organization devoted to science and humor. The goal is to highlight scientific studies that first make people laugh, then think. A ceremony is held every year at Harvard University

Here a cat, whose body fits perfectly within a sink, behaves like a liquid. William McCamment, CC BY-SA

At the center of the definition of a liquid is an action: A material must be able to modify its form to fit within a container. The action must also have a characteristic duration. In rheology this is called the relaxation time. Determining if something is liquid depends on whether it’s observed over a time period that’s shorter or longer than the relaxation time.

If we take cats as our example, the fact is that they can adapt their shape to their container if we give them enough time. Cats are thus liquid if we give them the time to become liquid. In rheology, the state of a material is not really a fixed property – what must be measured is the relaxation time. What is its value and on what does it depend? For example, does the relaxation time of a cat vary with its age? (In rheology we speak of thixotropy.)

Could the type of container be a factor? (In rheology this is studied in “wetting” problems.) Or does it vary with the cat’s degree of stress? (One speaks of “shear thickening” if the relaxation time increases with stress, or “shear thinning” if the opposite is true.) Of course, we mean stress in the mechanical sense rather than emotional, but the two meanings may overlap in some cases.

What cats show clearly is that determining the state of a material requires comparing two time periods: the relaxation time and the experimental time, which is the time elapsed since the onset of deformation initiated by the container. For instance, it may be the time elapsed since the cat stepped into a sink. Conventionally, one divides the relaxation time by the experimental time, and if the result is more than 1, the material is relatively solid; if the result is lower than 1, the material is relatively liquid.

And the answer:  Yes, under some circumstances cats are indeed liquids.

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This piece from Gizmodo tells you the best way to summon a strange cat, either outdoors or at a friend’s house.  Click to read:

An excerpt:

The study was conducted by researchers at Paris Nanterre University’s Laboratory of Compared Ethology and Cognition, led by Charlotte de Mouzon. De Mouzon has been studying the ins-and-outs of cat-human interaction for several years now. Last October, for instance, she and her team published a paper suggesting that pet cats can readily distinguish their owner’s voice from that of a stranger’s and can also often tell when their owner is directly speaking to them.

. . .For this latest research, published Wednesday in the journal Animals, she wanted to get a better sense of how cats respond to our different modes of communication, both alone and when interwoven with each other.

“When we communicate with them, what is more important to them? Is it the visual cues or the vocal cues? That was the starting question of our research,” de Mouzon told Gizmodo.

They recruited help from 12 cats living at a cat cafe. The experimenter (de Mouzon herself) first got the cats used to her presence. Then she put them through different scenarios. The cats would enter a room and then de Mouzon interacted with them in one of four ways: She called out to them but made no gestures toward them otherwise, like extending out her hand; she gestured toward them but didn’t vocalize; she both vocalized and gestured toward them; and, in the fourth, control condition, she did neither.

THE ANSWER:

The cats approached de Mouzon the fastest when she used both vocal and visual cues to catcall them, compared to the control condition—a finding that wasn’t too unexpected. But the team was surprised by the fact that the cats responded quicker to the visual cues alone than they did to the vocal cues. De Mouzon points out that owners routinely love to adopt a “cat talk voice” with their pets, so they figured that cafe cats would respond better to vocalizations. They now theorize that this preference might be different for cats interacting with human strangers than it would be for their owners.

So, when calling out to a strange cat on the street (something I do EVERY time I get near an outdoor cat), extend your hand and call to them in a soft baby voice.

Langiappe from France (be sure to click the links):

A separate key lesson learned from this research is that French people seem to have their own unique way of getting cats to notice them. The paper details de Mouzon using “a sort of ‘pff pff’ sound” as her vocal cue, which is apparently widely used by people in France to call cats. When she demonstrated the gesture over Zoom, it sounded like a “kissy” sound, at least to this reporter’s ear. And importantly, it was subtly distinct from the “pspsps” sound that’s common among English-speakers trying to attract a cat.

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Lagniappe: Jared Leto as Choupette (the late Karl Lagerfeld’s beloved still-living cat) at the Met Gala:

h/t: Bill, Ginger K., Thomas

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 20, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today we have another photo-and-text story from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His narrative is indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them

Cleared for take-off

In 1930s Germany, a renowned aerodynamics engineer was having dinner with a biologist when the conversation drifted to the subject of flying bees. The engineer, possibly animated by a sip or two of schnapps, showed the biologist some back-of-the-envelope calculations to prove that bees could not generate sufficient lift to fly. Apparently impressed by his interlocutor’s acumen, the biologist went on to share with his peers the scientific proof that bees can’t fly. The press picked up on the story, and an urban myth was born – although this is only one of a few tales explaining the origin of the widespread belief that scientists have proved that bumblebees can’t fly (nobody knows how bumblebees got involved).

But as bumblebees carry on stubbornly contradicting science by doing what they are supposedly unable to do, one group of people found the explanation for this paradox: creationists. “Of course, our Creator God knows how to make a bumble bee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out” (Creation Moments, an American creationist broadcaster); “God created all living things, therefore, He knows exactly how to make a bumble bee fly, even when it defies logic, and when even the best of modern science can’t figure this thing out” (The Washington Informer, an American creationist publication).

A flying bumble bee: a miracle in action © marsupium photography, Wikimedia Commons.

Alas, what the anonymous engineer proved to the gullible biologist was that 1930s mathematical models were too crude to explain the flight of a bee. The aerodynamics theories available then were based on observations and experiments with the rigid wings of an aeroplane. Under these models, a bee couldn’t possibly fly however much wing-beat power it mustered; its wings are too small for its body size, and would generate too much drag.

But the flight of a bee is much more complex than an aeroplane’s. Bees’ wings are not stiff structures that flap up and down; they bend, twist and rotate to make quick, arched and sweeping waves forwards and back. The angling of wings and a very high wing-beat frequency create vortices of low pressure under the bee, keeping it aloft. So bees are more similar to crude helicopters than to aeroplanes. Bee aerodynamics have been extensively studied and explained with no need for heavenly input (e.g., Sane, 2003. Journal of Experimental Biology 206: 4191-4208; Altshuler et al., 2005. PNAS 102: 18213-18218).

The flight of a honeybee comprises up-and-down movements, forward-and-backward movements, and torsion (the partial rotary movement of the wing on its long axis). The wing tip describes a long, narrow and slanting figure of eight © Arizona Board of Regents / ASU Ask A Biologist:

 

Even with these intricate manoeuvres, flying is challenging for a chunky bee such as a bumblebee. Brute force is needed to sort out its weight problem: a bumblebee beats its wings up to 200 times per second. Such tremendous speed is only possible thanks to the bee’s morphology. Unlike birds and bats, bees’ flying muscles are not attached directly to the wings, but to the thorax. Dorsoventral muscles run from the top to the bottom of the thorax, and dorsal-longitudinal muscles run from the front to the back of the thorax (the wing muscles of mayflies, dragonflies and cockroaches have a different configuration). By alternating rhythmic pulsations of these muscles, a bee squeezes and expands its thorax, generating a great deal of energy that is channelled into wing-flapping at mindboggling speeds, akin to vibrations of a bowstring. Watch the whole cycle in slow motion, and the result in real life. [JAC: don’t miss going to these two links!]

A bee’s flying apparatus: the contraction of the longitudinal muscles and relaxation of the vertical muscles expand the thorax upwards and drive the wings downward. The relaxation of the longitudinal muscles and contraction of the vertical muscles push the thorax sideways, driving the wings upward © John R. Meyer & David B. Orr, North Carolina State University.

The buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) – and presumably other bumble bee species – makes its life even more complicated by flapping the left and right wings independently, which is an aerodynamically inefficient, not to mention inelegant, way of travelling (Bomphrey et al., 2009. Experiments in Fluids 46: 811–821). But inefficiency does not stop bumble bees. Some species are capable of migrating hundreds of kilometres (albeit with the help of wind currents); others have been recorded living in montane habitats as high as 5,000 metres, where oxygen levels and temperatures are taxing to most flying creatures. The fittingly named Bombus impetuosus can go further up: males released inside a chamber with an atmosphere rarefied to pressures equivalent to an altitude of 9,000 m (higher than Mount Everest) could sustain flight by simply beating their wings in broader strokes (Dillon & Dudley, 2014. Biology Letters 10: 20130922). Cold and lack of food would prevent such an adventure, but not aerodynamics.

Fly over that mound? Not a problem for B. impetuosus © Rdevany, Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to their high-energy fuel – nectar – bumblebees can easily fly for several kilometres in search of pollen and more nectar. They can, but prefer not to. Shorter trips are more energy-efficient than long journeys, so bumble bees tend to stick around their nests (50 m to 2 km radius) as long as the surroundings are rewarding, food-wise. Other bees follow a similar pattern. Even small species can go over the 10 km mark, and the orchid bee Euplusia surinamensis seems to hold the record: a marked and released bee found its way home from a distance of 23 km through the jungles of Central America (Janzen, 1971. Science 171: 203-205).

The orchid bee E. surinamensis, a long distance flyer. Art by Dru Drury, 1770. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Bees’ flying distances are usually correlated with body size, but overall they tend to maximise energy gains by keeping foraging expeditions short. This has implications for the management of pollinators’ habitat. As a general rule, based on results from a number of bee species, flower patches are best placed within a few hundred metres of each other to facilitate foraging and reduce the risk of bees running on empty (Zurbuchen et al., 2010. Biological Conservation 143: 669–676).

The flight of a bee is not mysterious or miraculous, but it is a complex and demanding activity. Bees resort to it judiciously for their survival.

The dream of flying: Jack-of-all-trades Tito Livio Burattini (1617-1681) guaranteed that landing his glider Dragon Volant would cause ‘only the most minor injuries’ to the pilot. Supposedly a cat was its first and last passenger (Hart, 1985. The Prehistory of Flight, U. of California Press). Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 20, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings on Caturday (shabbos for Jewish felids), May 20, 2023, and National Quiche Lorraine Day. This tasty and deeply unhealthy dish was known outside the Lorraine region of NW France only after the 1950s:

It’s also Armed Forces Day, Flower Day, International Red Sneakers Day, National Rescue D*g Day, World Fiddle Day, World Whisky Day, Emancipation Day, Josephine Baker Day (declared by the NAACP for her civil rights activism), World Bee Day  and World Metrology Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 20 Wikipedia page.

Today’s Google Doodle is a “spot the axolotl” animation (these amphibians are critically endangered, living only in freshwater in the Valley of Mexico). Travel along the lake floor and, when you spot one, click. If you get enough photos right, you win!  Click to go to the game:

Da Nooz:

*There’s only a bit more than a week left until the U.S. hits its debt limit, and until yesterday things looked as if there would be a rapprochement between Biden and the Republicans that would stave off a default. Now things have hit a snag again.

Negotiations between top White House and Republican congressional officials over a deal to raise the debt limit hit a snag on Friday when a G.O.P. leader in the talks said it was time to “press pause,” complaining that President Biden’s team was being unreasonable and that no progress could be made.

It was a setback in the effort to avert a debt default before a June 1 deadline, though it was not clear whether the delay was a tactical retreat or a lasting blow to chances of getting an agreement.

The halt came one day after the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus declared that Republicans should cease negotiations with Mr. Biden and insist on their debt limit legislation, which demanded steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the federal borrowing cap and is a dead letter in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The abrupt announcement of a pause also came just a day after Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters that he believed negotiators could reach a deal in principle as early as the weekend. But on Friday Mr. McCarthy and his deputies sounded a starkly different tone, saying that White House officials were refusing to come their way on spending cuts.

. . .“We’ve got to get movement by the White House, and we don’t have any movement,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol not long afterward. “We’ve got to pause.”

He hinted that a major sticking point was over how to cap federal spending. House Republicans passed a debt limit bill last month that would raise the nation’s borrowing limit into next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels for a decade.

It’s getting down to the wire, and I’m hoping that, given the gravity of this situation, the desire to compromise outweighs a partisan fight for “victory.”

*Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance, and a short speech, at Thursday’s PEN America Gala, and I’m very glad that he’s able to do this. He even had some booze!

Salman Rushdie walked onstage at PEN America’s annual gala on Thursday night, his first public appearance since he was stabbed and gravely wounded in an attack last August at a literary event in Western New York.

His appearance at the gala, which had not been announced, was a surprise. But no surprise, to those who know him, was that he began his speech with a joke.

“Well, hi everybody,” Rushdie said, as the crowd at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan greeted him with whoops and a standing ovation. “It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also an option. I’m pretty glad the dice rolled this way.”

His remarks, just a few minutes long, in accepting an award for courage may have been uncharacteristically terse. But Rushdie, who lost sight in one eye because of the attack, was his voluble self during the cocktail hour, for which he had slipped in through a side door before taking his place for a red-carpet photo op.

Flashbulbs popped. And as the crowd began to notice him, friends headed over for handshakes and hugs.

“I just thought if there’s a right thing to chose as a re-entry, it’s this,” he said in an interview. “It’s being part of the world of books, the fight against censorship and for human rights.”

Here’s a photo with the caption from the NYT:

Salman Rushdie, whose appearance at PEN America’s gala was not publicized beforehand, was greeted by the crowd with a standing ovation.Credit: Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.

What’s a bit ironic about this is that six PEN America members refused to show up at this gala in 2015 when Charlie Hebdo was getting a “courge” award. Their reason? Because the French magazine was making fun of Islam, held by “marginalized people”. Well, that’s why Rushdie was given a fatwa that was supported by many in the West.

*Here are three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: The suburbs are back.” Speaking of PEN:

→ Masha Gessen resigns from PEN Board: Prestigious literary group PEN America was hosting their annual World Voices Festival of International Literature and decided that Russian dissident writers were still too Russian to attend. So they canceled the Russian writers panel. The writer Masha Gessen, one of those Russian dissidents, resigned as vice president of the PEN board over it. Anyway, it’s a typical mess. Amid bad publicity PEN apologized, calling it a big misunderstanding. I’m all for helping the Ukrainians and am pro–Team America World Police, but liberal America’s intensity on this war has gotten to the point where we’re going to have to watch out for suburban dads terrorizing local pierogi joints.

I disagree with PEN, which is woke, but I also disagree with Bowles’s ire towards “liberal America’s intensity” about the war.

→ Because the culture war was getting boring: The LGBTQ advisory group of Massachusetts is recommending that the commonwealth expand child abuse laws to include “the withholding of gender-affirming care for LGBTQ youth.” (H/t Wesley Yang for finding that.) Tasking child protective services with taking children away if they’re not immediately put on hormone therapy will surely calm the conversation around this.

Meanwhile, Texas Children’s Hospital said they would stop performing hormonal and surgical interventions on gender nonconforming children but has not stopped, according to a City Journal investigation. And The New York Times, in attempting a takedown of pediatric patients who detransitioned, accidentally confirmed that 15-year-old girls are getting mastectomies.

→ MeToo is out: There were a few years when the focus of modern society was on women and the slogan was #BelieveWomen and make them feel safe and comfortable. Now, #MeToo is #done.

Case #1: The group of sorority sisters in Wyoming who are suing their sorority for allowing a biological male who occasionally IDs as a woman to join, alleging that the new member had a boner while they changed clothes. The villain in the modern telling? Those girls! (Also I will say, the “transwoman” here doesn’t seem totally legit, as it were, in that they haven’t changed the sex on their driver’s license, haven’t had surgery, and apparently rarely even wear women’s clothes. I’m gonna need to see a little more effort before you can go full Kappa Kappa pillow party.)

Case #2: In Seattle, a city official who is a rape survivor didn’t want a convicted repeat sex offender to serve on the homelessness council but was overruled this week. The new line: believe none of these crazy ladies! They’re being a little touchy, don’t you think? A little. . . hysterical?

*In his Weekly Dish column, “The Queers versus the homosexuals,” Andrew Sullivan takes a look at what the “queer movement,” including transgender activists, has done to the gay and lesbian movements, and he doesn’t like it. First, he argues that “queers now run the gay rights movement, and adds:

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. . . .

To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement. (For a longer, piercing reflection on the takeover, read historian Jamie Kirchick’s new essay in Liberties. For a discussion of the homophobia of the new queer activism, see Ben Appel’s excellent essay in Spiked.). . .

Gay hook-up apps now include biological women seeking gay men and straight men looking for chicks with dicks. “NO MEN” some profiles now say — on what was once a gay man’s app. There are fewer and fewerexclusively gay male spaces left. Lesbian bars? Almost gone entirely. Lesbians themselves? On their way out. Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant. (Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: “I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.” We are going backward, not forward.)

Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.

. . . The queers regarded any therapy exploring other possible reasons for a child’s transgender identity — autism, family breakdown, abuse, bullying — as “conversion therapy,” and have made it illegal in some states. But the original Dutch study on which this entire medical regime stands specifically excluded any child with any other mental health challenges. It’s not as if the queers ignored the original safeguards, or didn’t know about them; they just consciously threw them away.

. . .You might imagine that, given this record, the queers would go out of their way to reassure us, to show how tight the safeguarding is, how they screen thoroughly to ensure that gay kids are not swept up in this. But they regard the very question of whether gay kids are at risk as out of bounds. Children are regarded as the ultimate authority on their own treatment: not the doctor or the parents, but the child.

Here’s a queer activist writer, Masha Gessen, saying that one thing “should be off limits” in this debate:

[In the NYT] there’s a [paraphrased] quote from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay journalist, who says, Well, maybe these people would’ve been gay—implying they’re really gay and not really transgender. That really clearly veers into the territory of saying ‘These people don’t exist. They’re not who they say they are.’ So that’s why it’s so painful.

No it doesn’t. It’s perfectly possible to believe that transgender people exist, but that children may not know who or what they are before they’ve even gone through puberty.

. . . But we have to be insistent that the gay experience is distinct and different and not intrinsically connected to either queer ideology or the trans experience. We have to demand that children’s bodies — gay, straight, trans, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming — be left alone. And we must do all we can to make sure that the trans-queer revolution does not result in what it seems to be moving toward: the eradication of homosexuality from public life.

He goes on to claim that this kind of activism is driving gay men and women away from liberal politics. I’m in no position to evaluate that, but Sullivan does make some credible claims.

Oh, and a bit of self-aggrandizement: from the “Money quotes” for the week section:

“White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways. P.S. Nature is amazing. P.P.S. Sex is not binary,” – Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American. The sparrows have just two sexes, as Community Notes corrected. Jerry Coyne has a beaut of a piece on this.

*If you’re into good but inexpensive red wines, and who’s not, then have a look at the WSJ’s article “Italy’s Best Bargain in Red Wines Now“.

What’s your favorite bargain red? That’s a question I’ve fielded many times, and after a recent tasting I have a new reply: Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

Produced in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, a good Montepulciano d’Abruzzo can cost as little as $9, though many cost more and tend to be, correspondingly, more complex. I hadn’t tasted much Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in recent years, but the 15 bottles I bought, priced between $9 and $28, were, with a few exceptions, so good that I will definitely be buying more.

. . .I’ve never been to Abruzzo, but I’ve heard it described in such captivating terms that I’m determined to rectify that fact. San Francisco-based restaurateur and wine director Shelley Lindgren is a big fan who’s visited Abruzzo seven times and described it as “hauntingly beautiful.” Although the region has long been undersung and overlooked, Lindgren thinks that thanks to the heightened quality of Abruzzo wines and the beauty of the region, it’s “having a moment and deservedly so.”

Lindgren said that Montepulciano d’Abruzzo wines are always among the bestselling by-the-glass offerings at both of her A16 restaurants, in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.

Author Lettie Teague recommends five wines between $9 and $26, and here’s one that intrigues me:

And how can the lush, aromatic 2021 DeAngelis Montepulciano d’Abruzzo cost a mere $12 a bottle? It seems the DeAngelis family, whose winery is located in Marche, just across the border from Abruzzo, maintains a long-term contract to buy organic Montepulciano grapes from a great Abruzzo source.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are philosophically sardonic:

Hili: even narcissuses wither with time.
A: But they do not stop thinking highly about themselves.
In Polish:
Hili: Nawet narcyzy z czasem więdną.
Ja: Ale nie przestają o sobie dobrze myśleć.
And a lovely picture of Baby Kulka with a caption:  “In case anybody has any doubts, this picture was, of course, taken by Paulina.” (In Polish: “Gdyby ktoś miał wątpliwości, to zdjęcie jest oczywiście zrobione przez Paulinę.”)

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From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Now That’s Wild!:

From Beth:

From Masih, more punishment for protesting:

From Barry. Cat: “I was just checking the wall.”

From Malcom. INCOMING!

From Ricky Gervais, the world’s most disgusting selfie:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, mother and child gassed upon arrival:

From Dr. Cobb, who’s on his way home from the USA. A medieval hybrid:

Digging through Francis Crick’s papers in La Jolla, Matthew found a reference to his own Ph.D. advisor:

Ah, Vonnegut: