Scientists who study life on Earth have something in common with scientists who study the climate of Earth. Besides being scientists, that is.

Practically all life scientists accept that life on Earth initially evolved from non-living materials billions of years ago, and has continued to evolve via natural selection – as initially proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject evolution.

Practically all climate scientists accept that the Earth’s atmospheric temperature is rising and that human-generated carbon dioxide is a primary cause of that rise – as initially proposed by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess in 1957, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject anthropogenic global warming.

Both life and climate scientists deal with “arguments”, usually endlessly-iterated catchphrases, that are inaccessible to logic. As Richard Dawkins relates in The God Delusion, a person once heard Dawkins out and then told him, ‘Your argument is compelling, but I don’t believe it.’

Both life and climate scientists deal with ad hominem attacks that seek to discredit their work by assassinating their characters. As if the alleged indiscretions of golfer Tiger Woods somehow erase the scores Woods posted in winning, to date, 14 major championships. (That earthquake was the flamboyant, and less than discrete, golf legend Walter Hagen rolling over in his grave, laughing hysterically over the Woods furore.)

Both life and climate scientists face these challenges, in part, because, as Jeff Masters (yes, Mom, him again) so eloquently puts it in the latest entry to his “Manufactured Doubt” blog series, they “are honest, incredibly hard-working … servants who are enduring a punishing assault on their integrity because they are the bearers of bad news (emphasis added)”.

Bad news to the religions, especially Christian religions, because the findings of the life scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our spiritual well-being.

Bad news to the fossil fuel industries, because the findings of the climate scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our material well-being.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries have fought back. By proclamation of dogma (of, literally, the “Good News” in the case of Christianity) or manufacturing of doubt. And, most importantly, by means of emotional appeals. A cross moves more hearts than a dissertation. A Hummer is a whole lot sexier, and easier to grasp, than a long catalogue of facts. And it may even cost less.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries pay people, often handsomely, who are trained in the techniques of manipulating feelings. Precisely what the scientist is trained to abhor. It is obviously money well spent … for half of We the People are supporting the hypothesis that an ounce of emo is worth a pound – nay, a ton – of data.

And therefore – because the very people who profit most from your agreement to this statement say so – neither evolution nor global warming exist.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude! C’mon! We gotta see this!”

“See what, dude?”

“The surf on the North Shore, dude! Fifty footers!“

“And how are you going to get to see them?”

“Drive out to the beach. How else?“

“And how are you going to do that, when the beach is closed?“

“Whaddaya mean, closed?“

“Pollution, dude. Even if those fifty feet are clean, the smell will …”

“Will you get in the car already?!?“

“OK, dude, but the traffic’s going to be horrendous. And if we can’t get there ’cause the road’s been blocked, don’t blame me.”

“Get real, dude. What could block the roads?”

“Water and rocks, dude. You do know what you call a really big wave when it clobbers the shoreline, don’t you?”

“What?”

“SIR-f.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As Quilly has already related, we spent much of today (1 December 2009) at the beach.

Yes, yes, we know, we know. If it’s any consolation, in another month or so we’ll be in hats and mittens just like so many of the rest of you.

It was a work trip for me. Yes it was. I was collecting seaweed species that may be new to science for identification and laboratory cultivation.

It was a photo shoot for her. One of the photos was of a green caterpillar, inching its way up a dead stick.

“Oh, look. An inchworm. How cute!”

We’re lucky it didn’t bite us.

Really.

Y’see, in most of the world, inchworms are harmless little things, going around measuring marigolds (prior to devouring them) and inspiring Hollywood crooners, not to mention Muppets, to promote the idea that aesthetics are superior to mathematics. (Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba could say something about “teacher furloughs” at this point, but as this has been a consistent refrain on this blog lately, he will refrain.)

In Hawai‘i, the Land of Aloha? They’re killers. The insect equivalent of a bunny rabbit with fangs. In the language of the entomologist, the Hawaiian inchworm is an “ambush” or “sit-and-wait” predator. They lounge around on the botanical equivalent of a streetcorner, whistling nonchalantly and trying to look inconspicuous. Until a fly or moth or similar variation on the theme of Meals on Wings comes within reach, and then … WHAM!!

You don’t believe me?

Shame on you.

Of course, the marigolds are all for this. They’ve got advertisements on all the major websites of the Inchwormnet, showing posies with crude hand-lettered signs:

EAT MOR BEETALS

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: “What’cha working on?”

He: “Sea lettuce.”

She: “Where? And what are you doing eating at your desk anyway? Don’t I feed you enough?”

He: “No, love, not ’see lettuce, bring your glasses’. ‘Sea lettuce, bring your bathing suit.’ It’s a kind of seaweed.”

“A nickel bag, dude? For us? Gnarl…“

“Dude! Shut up!!“

You jokers never learn, do you?

She: “Who are you talking to?!?”

He: “Me, myself, and I. If you’d been working on this sea lettuce report as long as I have, you’d probably be talking to yourself too.”

She: “No, there’s only one of me. If I desire conversation, I go looking for real people.”

He: “Oh, so you’d like to go fishing. Why didn’t you just say so?”

She: “Don’t make me regret reeling you in. You and your imaginary friends.”

He: “What imaginary friends?!?”

She: “The ones that pop up when you stay up all night writing reports and don’t get any sleep. What’s this all about?”

He: “You remember the Olympics in Beijing last year?”

She: “Wasn’t that when Michael Phelps was winning all those gold medals, swimming?”

“And smokin’ too, dude.”

That was later.

She: “What was later?”

He: “The cleanup. Actually, it was earlier, before the Olympics. Just hope Phelps knew how lucky he was, not having to swim outdoors.”

She: “Because why?”

He: “Because of the sea lettuce.”

She: “I sure hope he didn’t do any more than look at it. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to go into the water until at least half an hour after you eat!”

He: “Trust me, neither he nor anyone else wanted to see it, never mind eat it. All they wanted to do was get rid of it.”

She: “Ewww …”

“Ewww …”

“Ewww …”

She: “Echoes?”

He: “Yeah. ‘Cause it all happened again this summer. In France and in Seattle. Stuff piles up on the beaches and really makes a wrack of things.”

“Party down, dude! Hit the beach and get wracked!“

“Stop yelling, dude! You’ll make yourself hoarse.”

Yeah. A dead horse.

She: “Is it my turn yet?”

He: “They don’t eat sea lettuce.”

She: “Who don’t?”

He: “The terns, of course.”

She: “Well, I won’t be eating any, that’s for sure.”

He: “Why not?”

She: “You think I want a toxic waist? Leave that report and come to bed. If those imaginary friends of yours have any consideration, they’ll finish it for you while you’re asleep.”

“Finish the report, she says. How the hell’re we supposed to do that, dude?”

“I dunno, dude. Furniture polish?”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba was attracted to science from an early age. One of my first memories – I might have been seven – was announcing to my mother, as we were sitting in the parking lot of our favorite corner store, “I’m going to be a research scientist.”

Today, I’m a research scientist. Gaudeamus igitur, eh? I mean, how many seven-year-old physicians and lawyers were truck drivers and file clerks when they turned 40? Rather more than became physicians and lawyers, I reckon.

“Be careful what you request in life”, the cliché goes. “You might get it.”

That seven-year-old research scientist also spent a lot of time in the woods. Alone. Picking berries, catching toads, sniffing flowers, looking for snakes and salamanders under rocks and old boards, and being annoyed (not to mention freaked out) when he got ants instead.

Why alone?

Because people scared me.

They still do.

Nature is predictable. It’s safe. The mayflowers would always bloom in May, unless it had been an early spring. It was a challenge to find them, and a delight to succeed. The black-colored blueberry bushes were always in a patch next to the Indian fern where the fire trail turned into the woods, and they would always have their berries in early August, unless the bushes were too far under the trees, in which case there would be no berries. The salamanders could only be found under boards that were damp but not rotten, and they would be gone by first frost.

People, especially kids my age but many adults too, were unpredictable, dangerous. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to go for walks in the woods to look for ring-necked snakes with me, though most of them didn’t. It was because, at any moment, without warning, they could transform from smiling companion to snarling monster, demanding to have things that could not be had (usually, that week’s fad toy) or demanding to do things that were forbidden, like running around yelling, or playing poker for money, or deciding that the greatest possible graduation gift is a hit of cocaine. Do as we want, they announced, or you’re mean, or chicken, or (worst of all) boring.

Mean, chicken, boring children tend to go off by themselves for walks in the woods to commune with the box turtles. When there still were box turtles.

Nature, I found, doesn’t try to manipulate you. It just is. Pay close enough attention, and you can discover what each part is and how it works within the system. Giving you information that no amount of bullying will make untrue.

And when I discovered that there was a whole group of people, the scientists who (the advertising brochures said) put their emotions aside to discuss, dispassionately, the workings of Nature, judging your interpretations of it, not on the eloquence of your oratory or the caliber of your handguns, but on your mastery of the data you present – well, I said “Sign me up, that’s for me!” …

This morning (31 August 2009), a colleague sent around a series of discussions published by leaders in the field of organismal evolution, one of the areas in which I work. It was immediately clear that there was nothing dispassionate in the tenor of these discussions, and, in some cases, there was noting resembling data either. It was a bunch of grown men calling each other mean, chicken, or boring. And meaning it, if one accepts the accompanying note that says “they hated each other”. I have seen enough towering egos in action, at scientific meetings and elsewhere, to accept it.

And with one of these discussions, there was another note, which acknowledged that one of these men was a “first-class debater” – so good at his trade that “he doesn’t lose”.

Now, I can relate to not wishing to lose. I do not do losing very well. People who mean well keep trying to remind me that baseball players who fail at the plate 70% of the time wind up in the Hall of Fame. I want 50%, or I will be angry with myself for not taking enough batting practice, not studying enough films of the pitchers, not ingesting the proper, um, vitamins. In scientific terms, I expect that the data I gather will be enough to win the argument, or I have failed to gather or interpret the data correctly. And if I fail, I feel that I have no recourse in honor or justice but to slink away in shame, never to bother anyone else ever again.

But, a debater who doesn’t lose? In the sciences? That person is not putting the data first, he is putting himself first. After all, a debater is judged, not by the data but by the presentation – in formal debate, the speaker may have to persuade an audience to support a position that he himself thinks is totally hellacious. If he pulls it off, he wins – in despite of even his own interpretation of the data.

If emotive persuasiveness is a hallmark of a leader in my field, then Adolph Hitler was the greatest scientist that ever lived.

Had I known that, after the years of study and financial sacrifice that allowed me to become a research scientist, I would still be surrounded by the kinds of bullies who scared me when I was a kid picking berries in the woods, bullies who set policy on the basis of coercion rather than on dispassionate analysis of hard data, I’d likely have become a truck driver or file clerk and saved myself a lot of trouble.

I might yet.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

If you’ve been following along with us here, you’ve probably noticed that, on occasion, Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s labors, or his anxieties, keep him up all night. And how, on such occasions, Quilly may offer to rock him to sleep. With a real rock.

Ah, if she only knew.

There is, in fact, no shortage of rocks on the Hawai‘ian Islands. But they tend to come in only two kinds. Volcanic basalt, typically black or rust-colored, and coral, typically white. Graffiti on Hawai‘i Island’s Kona coast means doing your tagging in white coral on black lava flows.

You didn’t believe me, did you? See what you get when that happens?

Thing is, that coral rock only turns white after it’s been washed up on the beach and set in the sun for awhile. While it’s still underwater, it’s usually anything but white. Live coral, of course, still has coral animals on it, and they usually cover the rock part in brilliant colors, so that no white shows.

And after the coral animals die, the rock they leave behind still isn’t usually white. In fact, it fairly quickly turns green, usually.

Because the algae take over. Not only on the rock but in it.

The picture at left shows some of these algae as they appear actually inside the rock. To give you some idea of scale, the filaments are about half as wide as a typical human hair. The picture below it shows the same alga as it appears growing in a Petri dish. The rock it was in was invited to leave, and accepted the invitation, having seen what happened to the one that was sacrificed so that the first picture could be taken. That sacrifice was based on the laws of optics, which state that microscopes can’t see through objects much thicker than flat sand grains, and the laws of classical mechanics, which state that the head of a sledge hammer accelerated through a piece of coral rock will beget sand grains.

The alga does have a name. We think; more on this in a minute. Naturally, that name isn’t anything simple like “Fred” or even “Tebucky“. It’s Phaeophila dendroides, which means something like “branched shade-lover”.

So does all this mean anything, except to prove that certain Amoebae have rocks on the brain? Well, planet Earth has a whole lot of coral rock lying around, most of which has these algae in it. These algae get into the rock by dissolving bore holes into it with acid. This, of course, dissolves the coral, which consists almost entirely of the mineral calcium carbonate.

Let me restate that. The coral rock consists almost entirely of calcium CARBONate. (If you’re a global warming skeptic, you might wish to cover your eyes while you’re reading this next part.) Dissolving calcium carbonate gives off carbon dioxide gas – which you may have heard about in the same sentence as “greenhouse” lately. When animals like corals make calcium carbonate, they’re taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When these algae dissolve the calcium carbonate, they’re putting the carbon dioxide back.

And its possible that, as global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, these algae will grow faster and release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

You could say that, while we humans are chucking the fossil carbon into the air from oil, gas, and coal stocks that were millions of years in the making, these algae are (we think) chucking the fossil carbon into the air from carbonate stocks that were millions of years in the making.

The scale of the contribution that these rock-boring algae may make to global-warming-mediated climate change is unknown, because, by and large, we know little more about them than that they exist, and that there’s a whole lot of them out there. Which is why I have a lab with people in it who are smashing coral rock into flat sand grains, so we can start doing experiments to find out just what the heck is going on here.

We’re not even sure about that fancy name. The algae that go by the name of Phaeophila dendroides are found literally all over the world, from the North Sea to Antarctica and everyplace in between. But even though they all look alike, they do not act alike. They act, in fact, as if there’s, not one, but several different kinds (“species”) out there.

Therefore, about two hours ago when I started to put this post together, I was sitting in front of a map, trying to work out which population of these algae belonged to which part of the world, and what name should be assigned to each population. Assuming the next rounds of experiments confirm that these namable populations exist. Of such questions and deliberations is my professional life made.

Maybe Quilly did try to rock me to sleep with a real rock, and I never noticed …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Quilly and I were out driving early on a Sunday afternoon not long ago. We had just gotten onto the (ahem) Interstate H-1 in Honolulu, bound for Hawai‘i Kai, when an object appeared on our windshield. A brown thing; it looked like a stick that had been out of sight in the windshield wiper well until the wind from our acceleration dislodged it.

At least, that’s what we thought. Until the stick flashed its bright red dewlap at us.

It was a lizard. Specifically, a brown anole lizard. No, it’s not native to Hawai‘i. Is anything native to Hawai‘i? Besides the centipedes, I mean. But you know about them already. The brown anoles hitchhiked to O‘ahu from the Caribbean. Maybe they thumbed a cargo boat, or a plane. Or they came first class, as somebody’s pet, and got loose when the kids grew tired of them.

This one had caught the cannonball – ours – to the east end of the island, and would get there in no time. If it lived. Which was by no means a sure thing. The environment at the base of the windshield of an automobile that is traveling a freeway at 60 mph = 100 kph tends to be a little windy. One misstep, and our reptilian stowaway would begin its long minute’s journey into squish.

But our passenger clearly was a hoppy frood who knew where his towel was. He refused to panic, and after a few minutes in the slipstream, glaring at us, he disappeared into the windshield wiper well. Not the wisest of moves, thought Quilly, remembering the showers that had been dampening O‘ahu over the preceding week. But no rain fell; the anole’s gamble paid off. We arrived home, and promptly forgot about him.

Until the following morning, when we went out to the car prepared to drive to our respective workplaces, and there was the hitchhiker, unconcernedly sunning himself on the hood. Male brown anoles defend territories, and this one, not having the option of a pink Cadillac, was prepared to make do with a tan Malibu.

And I was almost prepared to oblige. Brown anoles, after all, eat bugs, and older cars on O‘ahu, including this one, have enough buggy passengers to feed a whole colony of anoles. I could have called it our very own onboard biocontrol system.

But then I thought “long minute’s journey into squish” and made an executive decision. I blocked the lizard’s path to the windshield wiper well with one arm, scooped him into my other hand (rather to my surprise), and escorted him into the mock orange hedge at the side of the road. Into which he disappeared, never to be seen again.

Or did we? That tan duellist that Quilly captured on camera looks awfully familiar …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Spare a thought if you will, dear reader, for the one-hit wonder. You know, the musician who rockets from obscurity into white-hot fame with a single song, and then plummets back into the abyss.

Or the typecast actor, who mutates from nobody to celebrity on the strength of one role – and can never do anything but that role ever again.

Imagine what it must feel like to spend years working at a craft only to discover that one thing, and one thing only, makes a splash with an audience.

Like when you discover that a large chunk of the page views on your blog tracks to a single entry, and more specifically to the one picture on that single entry.

I have no idea why centipedes, the subject of that one picture, have become so popular all of a sudden. Perhaps a whole lot of college students are facing midterms in invertebrate zoology. Or perhaps a pack of young Calvins are collecting objects for their G.R.O.S.S.-club initiation rites. Whatever the reason, increasing numbers of people lately have been hitting on that picture. (I doubt they’re actually reading the post it’s on.)

And Google has been helping. As of this writing (15 April 2009), a websearch on both the text and the image functions of Google will call up the image in question. Over the last several weeks, the image has been progressing ever nearer to the top of the list.

However it is that Google decides such things. Probably by hit counts.

Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because everyone knows that the nearer you get to the top of a list, the more likely people are to check you out. Which is how come you see companies with names like AAAAAAAAardvark Service Services Inc. in the Yellow Pages.

(Let’s pause a moment while the under-twentysomethings out there do a websearch on “yellow pages”, and ensure themselves that this is not a synonym for “yellow snow“.)

I considered trying to capitalize on this trend by making this blog “all centipedes, all the time”. But I reasoned that it probably wouldn’t work. Just like Chubby Checker trying to sell reworked versions of The Twist over and over and over again didn’t work.

Not that the idea is completely without merit. For I discovered, while trying to figure out just what was going on with this apparent centipede craze, that a bunch of the images posted online under the name “centipede” are actually millipedes, or caterpillars, or sawfly larvae, or, well, who knows what else.

And even when the picture is matched correctly to the name, errors remain. Consider this quote from the Wikipedia page on centipedes:

Some species of centipedes can be hazardous to humans because of their bite. Although a bite to an adult human may only be painful, those with allergies that are similar to that of bee stings and small children are at greater risk.

So I guess that means, if you’re allergic to small children, don’t come to Hawai‘i, the centipedes will get you.

I don’t think the Chamber of Commerce is going to like that idea.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

[Cue James Earl Jones.]

It … has … begun.

Today (28 March 2009), at 8:30 PM at the place where you live, your world will be given over to Him. For an hour, you shall submit to your Royal Master, Phil, The Prince of Insufficient Light!

And you will turn your lights out.

[Cut! Great work as usual, James. See you next year.]

Now, your friendly neighborhood Amoeba is certain that the World Wildlife Fund would be less than pleased to find that its annual Earth Hour publicity stunt promotional gimmick contribution to global environmental awareness has been tied to a figure of the underworld. Even one whose powers are limited to darning you to Heck while totally gagging you with a spoon. Yessir, this here blog would be under the panda’s thumb if the panda ever found out about it. Of course, the panda would have to learn how to use a microscope to do that. Amoebae are pretty small, y’know. So are their blogs.

But, I mean, we gave at the office. Literally. A transformer blew in our building two weeks ago, and we’ve been working in the dark ever since, waiting for the Dolphin Express to tow its replacement over from California. And the dolphins are tired and cranky. That load was heavy, and they’re demanding time-and-a-half, or some tourists are going to get seriously splashed at Sea Life Park. We’ve paid our kilowatt dues already, man.

Besides. There’s a reason why the toes complain when you try to walk through your house at midnight without flipping a switch, Bill:

No. Turn the light on. Turn the light on, will you please? We’re not going through this again.

Bad things happen when you turn the lights out. There are table legs out there, waiting to destroy your toes. There are chicken hearts out there (thub-dub, thub-dub, thub-dub), waiting to destroy New York!

Worst of all, there are zealots out there, waiting to destroy the corporate world by getting the citizens of the planet to pull the plug on them!!

Or so they think. That laughter you hear is from the corporate executives rolling on the floor.

“You morons!”, they cry when they get their breath back. “You think your puny little demonstration means anything? OK, it’ll put a few bucks in your buckets. We’ll grant you, it’s not the worst ad campaign we’ve seen from a pack of rookies. But ‘the will of the people?’ Give us a break!

“Check on the power demand next week at this time, next month, next Christmas. Especially next Christmas. We listen to the real will of the people. And that means neon Santas, idiots, not people stubbing their toes on their way to the bathroom so they can save whales they’d never get to see if they didn’t have power for their televisions.

“And what if they did do as you say? Haven’t you been paying attention to the real news lately? About how lessening demand for goods and services, including energy products, is causing businesses to go under? The word depression mean anything to you cretins? You wildlife types want to get labelled as the rich snotty guys who threw millions of people out of work for the sake of a damned panda, we’re more than happy to help. And good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Bill Cosby was in the middle of telling his version of the Chicken Heart story, in character as a five-year-old kid, when he abruptly stepped out of character to announce to the audience:

I was dumb enough to do whatever the radio told me. “Turn your lights … ouuut.” “OK, they’re out. C’mon, scare me.”

And bad things happened. As Cosby’s father related to anybody within earshot.

Hey. Come over here and see my dumb kid. Go on, tell him how you burned up a $100 sofa and broke your father’s arm to save us from that thub-dub, thub-dub …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Originally posted on the defunct Felloffatruck Publications site on 28 May 2007, shortly after The Amoeba landed in Hawai‘i.

Quilly and I saw the same rainbow on our way to work this morning (25 February 2009), she in her car, I on my bicycle. A perfect arch, anchored on Waikiki to the south and Manoa to the north.

For my part, I imagined the guardian leprechauns giving stern lectures in physics to the ones (these days, probably including the Governor of Hawai‘i and the Mayor of Honolulu) who came seeking the pots of gold at the rainbow’s ends.

Then I remembered – the other day, Quilly put in a request for a hoodie. Which are all the rage among the Honolulu natives in winter, when it’s all of three degrees F colder than it is in summer. The same three degrees colder this winter than last, when we were running around in our shorts and T-shirts and wondering what the hell these crazy people were doing, wearing fur coats in this heat.

Made me wonder – if we’re getting acclimated to the weather, are we going to get acclimated to ho hum, just another rainbow? Sometimes (sadly) we have to be reminded what it’s like to marvel …

==================

The “Manoa” of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa is a valley, trending in a NE-SW direction, with the Ko‘olau Range at its head and Waikiki where it meets the sea. It is flanked by steep-sided spurs from the mountain range, rising hundreds of feet from the valley floor, which peter out about a mile and a half from the beach.

Up the valley about a mile from campus, there is a shopping center. I have business there, and start walking to it at about 3 PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon. At least, it’s sunny where I am. But the trade winds are blowing, and they are pushing clouds, thick clouds, white at the top but dark at the bottom, over the ridge and down into the head of the valley. Tendrils of those clouds reach for the shoppers of Manoa. They dissipate before they can make good their threat, but every once in awhile, there is a drop of mist on my cheek.

The walk takes about twenty minutes, much of it on a path where the houses and the mango trees block the view of the valley walls. At the end of the path is an open field. Here, the whole upper valley comes into view. And as I’m crossing that field, I notice the stub of a rainbow rising from the ridge spur to my right – the eastern wall of the valley.

Not much of a rainbow, I thought to myself, short and dim. I thought Hawai‘i was supposed to be able to do better than this.

Then I looked again. The stub was the upper part of a double rainbow. The lower part, brilliant and full, had splashed itself against the side of the ridge, never launching itself into the sky but expending its brightness like spray paint against the green mountain.

A few minutes, and a hundred yards or so, and the angle had changed enough so that the top of the bow just managed to clear the ridge. And standing over the top of the bow, almost touching it, there was the waxing moon, five days from the full.

I went into the shopping center, expecting to be inside a good long time and not seeing anything more of the rainbow.

I was right about the “good long time”. It was nearly two hours later when I finally got what I came for and could emerge from a place where the only things Hawai‘ian were the price tags. The sun was low in the sky by the time I could see it again, and the skies clear overhead. But the trades were still blowing, and I looked to the west and to the slanting rays of that sun, and they were mottled by drifts of mist.

And to the east, the rainbow, full and sharp, towered over the parking lot.

I stood in the middle of that parking lot, transfixed. Like I would have in Maine, where a rainbow of such perfect colors and dimensions would stop traffic. People would pile into each other, would race to windows and onto porches and patios (quite possibly still underwater from the just-passed violent thunderstorm), all of them digging for cameras and cell phones.

Manoa’s shopping center was full of cars and people, each one of them with a purpose, each one focused on his or her private errand. Not one of them so much as looked up.

I suppose that’s not so strange. I can imagine a citizen of Hawai‘i, newly landed in Maine, staring in blank-eyed astonishment at the lobsters in the aquarium’s touch tank. While the Mainahs shake their heads and slowly walk away. Tourists!

And then I noticed the moon. The filling moon, in exactly the same place on that rainbow, perched practically touching the top of its arch, that it had been when the rainbow was still spraypaint on the valley’s eastern spur. It’s as if the moon were pulling that rainbow. Stretching it into the fading of the day, higher and higher and yet higher still.

Until the arch can take no more and it shatters into brittle pieces that fall, dissolving as they go, never reaching the valley floor.

Leaving only the memory of color in the gray shapes under moonlight.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground weather site and a Ph.D.-holding meteorologist, recently posted a remarkable set of survey results on his blog.

The topic of the surveys was global climate change, and whether humans are responsible for the changes that we are now observing and are predicting (that word again, evolution fans) will occur in the near future.

What the surveys found was that, while 97% of scientists active in climate-change research agree with the premise that human activities are responsible for present-day global climate change, about half of the general public do not agree. Masters and his compadres fret, with good reason, about how difficult it appears to be to get the clear message from the science across to ol’ J. Q.

Maybe I can do just a little bit to help.

As Jeff M. relates in his blog, one of the arguments of the naysayers is “C’mon, you eggheads, give it a rest. No way can we puny humans throw up enough stuff to pollute the whole world!”

In rebuttal, I give you …

Pond scum.

That’s right.  Pond scum.  The slimy green stuff that grows in your swimming pool if you miss a treatment, or on your concrete walkway if you live someplace damp like Seattle in February, just waiting to trip up the letter carrier who’s delivering the legal complaint from when neighbor Rosenberg slipped on the stuff a month ago and scraped the skin off her arm.

Specifically, the kind of pond scum called blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria (in Greek, that means “blue bacteria”).  The pictures show three different kinds.  What’s that?  You didn’t know pond scum came in kinds? How ’bout tens of thousands of kinds (species)?  And counting?

Turns out, cyanobacteria have been around far longer than lawyers.  How long?  How ’bout three billion years, Felix? That’s billion with a B (yes, Mr. Bull, thousand million to you).  They’ve been around so long, the planet was hardly cool enough to hold them. 

Hell, the atmosphere didn’t even have any oxygen yet.  It was all tied up in things like water and carbon dioxide.  The Earth of three billion years ago was a great place to live, if you were a bacterium or a protozoon that grew by fermentation.

Then the cyanobacteria showed up. And they brought their damned photosynthesis with them. Started chewing up the water and carbon dioxide and spewing out …

Oxygen!

Global catastrophe!!

The fermenters of the early Earth didn’t exactly have the option of going to their local health supplement stores and stocking up on antioxidants. Maybe the stores had all closed in a global economic downturn that coincided with the climate change caused by the oxygen pollution. Whatever. They died, or they evolved to tolerate, and eventually make use of, the oxygen. And the world was forever changed.

Right now, the Earth’s atmosphere contains about 20% oxygen. Most of the scientists whose work I know think that the Earth’s atmosphere reached approximately this oxygen level a billion years before present. Make that Before Present. Just in case anybody from the Geologists Union happens to read this. Anyway. This was long before there were any trees to save (they started showing up around 300 million years ago, or, in geological time, maybe last week or thereabouts).

Think about it. If a skinny layer of pond scum can do all this, what about us with our cars, and our power plants, and our jetliners, and our farting cows, and …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

The other day, over at the online Bible study that Quilly is running, the discussion turned to the origin and meaning of sin.

(Yes, Mr. Squirrel. Again. Religious persons trying to solve the “sin” problem are just like Bullwinkle trying to pull the rabbit out of that damned hat. The trick never works, but they keep at it anyway. I sympathize.)

The question came up: is the urge to sin innate in humans, or is it planted there by, you know, the red-skinned guy with the horns, the hooves, and the pitchfork. No, sit down, Hellboy, I’m not talking about you.

I argued that sin must be innate, because we humans are descended from other creatures, and the lives of those other creatures are full of sex, lies, and videotape. OK, maybe not videotape. Or DVDs, either, if you must know. I confess, the next beetle I see with a microphone or a camera will be the first. Despite what you’ve heard about insects making their fortunes in porn. But, said I, I could tell a tale of sin among the bumblebees that would well and truly wrinkle your nose.

They didn’t believe me.

And, truth be told, they were right not to believe me. I don’t have a tale to tell. I have two, one (the one below) on the sin of thievery, and another on the sin of envy. So far.

Yes, bumblebees really will steal. Because they get lazy just like everybody else. (Hey, I can add “sloth” to the list!) The situations in this story are based on real scientific observations of organisms in nature. Well, OK, maybe not Snapdragon International, but … oh, read the story. See for yourself.

The tale told below was originally posted here.

==================================

STEAL, v. To remind those who have of the existence of those who have not.

The inventor of the flower was a genius. He or she – the designer’s identity has not come down to us – saw megatons of pollen that desperately needed to get shipped from one plant to another, and a huge, idle crowd of bugs wandering from place to place begging for handouts. Our hero splashed some paint on some leaves, hung a few balloons, placed a juice bar at the deliveries dock for visitors who were attracted by the advertising and came with a sack of pollen, and presto: UPS (Universal Pollen Service) was born. Simple, elegant, and everybody won.

Trouble was, of course, that all bugs were not created equal. Some were better couriers than others – and some, through ignorance, laziness, perversity, or a lucky break in size and shape, simply snuck in for the drinks and out without leaving so much as a tip. In the early days, this was OK, the job got done and there was plenty for all. Inevitably, though, the marketplace got crowded, competition increased, and words like “freeloader” entered the vocabularies of botanical boardrooms.

The CEO and CFO of Snapdragon International watched the weakening stock prices of “open access” flower companies, and thought they saw a way to increase shareholder values. “Redesign our blossoms”, they ordered, “so that only the most efficient pollen carriers can get to the bar.”

They did, and it worked. Labor productivity skyrocketed, as did Snapdragon International’s meadow share. Wages went up for the workers who could turn the tricks of the new posies, and the managers all got huge salary increases and hefty bonuses. Slums developed around the snapdragon stands, and beetles in rags were seen begging spare change in the business district and pushing shopping carts through the streets among the new luxury condos, but this hardly mattered.

Until the day when the President of the Bumblebees Union buzzed the executive offices demanding why, after all those years of bargaining in good faith and making all those onerous concessions in work rules and loading rates for the sake of the firm, her workers were not getting paid. An investigation revealed all: destitute insects, tipped off by disgruntled members of a rival labor organization (Allied Federations of Lepidoptera), were breaking into the backs of the flowers and stealing the nectar!

At this point, management was too deeply committed to its developments in bloom technology to change strategies; besides, an attempt to retrofit to “open access” mode would have caused a market stampede. So they invested in security measures, guarding the flowers with barricades, barbed wire, and ants armed with mace and stingers.

To no avail: the thieves circumvented all the security and the nectar kept disappearing. There were ugly confrontations, leading to riots and loss of life, all of which was, naturally, reported in the grassroots networks. A wave of selling hit Wallflower Street. The CFO had no choice but to ask the Bumblebees for wage concessions, which prompted first a work slowdown and, finally, a full-blown strike.

Snapdragon International wilted. Its assets were acquired by Burbee, which maintained Snapdragon’s more glamorous products through tissue culture and genetic engineering. Snapdragon’s managers were last seen, shopping carts in hand, standing in line with the roaches and fruit flies at the Magnolia Juice and Pollen Bread Kitchen. Except for the CEO and CFO, who were hired to head the Advanced Blossom Design subsidiary of the Orchid Conglomerate.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006, 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

This piece is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Bastiaan J. D. Meeuse of the University of Washington, who introduced me to the field, and allegorical possibilities, of floral pollination biology.

First posted on the late, unlamented Felloffatruck Publications site on 1 November 2007. Pulled out of the recycle bin in honor of our friends at Waking Ambrose, where rabbits are always good luck on the first of the month. Especially if the dog catches them.

============

What’s that? Rabbits have fur? Not hare, um, hair? Hey. How do you know I’m not praising rabbitkind in Hindi? Hare Rabbit, Hare Rabbit, Rabbit Rabbit, Hare Hare.

No, Potter, I was not calling you.

But since you’re here, I’ve gotta tell you something. You could’ve dealt with that Voldemort character a lot more quickly and cheaply than you did. All you needed to do was turn yourself into a hare, Harry, dive into a top hat, and make him have to pull you out. Voldemort would have died of embarrassment at having to resort to such a cheap magician’s trick, and your buddies would all be around for the sequels that Rowling will eventually wish she’d been able to write, without her having to break every known law of thermodynamics to get them back.

I’ve been hearing a lot about rabbits lately. Especially on the first of the month. Y’see, a bunch of the blogging buddies with whom Quilly and I hang out have taken to shouting Rabbit, rabbit! at each other with their first posts/comments on said first days of the month. Supposed to bring good luck, it is. Like carrying around a rabbit’s foot. Which, I suppose, is good luck for the person who bagged the rabbit. Not so good for the rabbit who got bagged.

Now, as most of you know by this time, I am a scientist. And one who isn’t much on superstitions. Knock wood. So when the first of the month comes along, I tend to make myself more unwelcome than usual by tweaking the bunny talk somehow. Like saying Kuniklo, kuniklo. “Rabbit, rabbit” in Esperanto. Or Lapaki, lapaki. Hawai‘ian.

I was surprised to find that there’s a Hawai‘ian word for “rabbit”. Hawai‘i hasn’t got any rabbits, and, if it weren’t for the missionaries with their Easters, followed by the soldiers and sailors with their Easter bunnies for their wives and kids, a Hawai‘ian wouldn’t have a clue what a rabbit is.

And – trust me on this – they wouldn’t want to know. They didn’t know about rats and mice and pigs and cows either, until they all got imported by the whiteskins and proceeded to rip up the ‘uala, along with just about everything else green and edible.

There would have been nothing lucky at all about a rabbit infestation on these islands. Except maybe for the rabbits. Which typically know a good thing when they find it, and how to take advantage. Quickly. Like when Bill Cosby’s Noah complained to God about the animals that were getting into the Ark:

Two rabbits. Only two. Only two.

The rabbits did get loose in plenty of places they didn’t belong. Like Australia, for instance. When I lived there, oh, a few decades ago now, Volkswagen was marketing a car called the Rabbit in the USA. The same car on Australian roads was called the Golf.

Now, I have nothing against golf. Hell, I owe my college education to golf, or at least to working on golf courses – Tiger Wood’s supremacy on the links is under no threat from me. But I thought “Golf” was a funny name for a car, even if the club with which you typically hit your first shot on every hole is called a driver. So, like the naive Yankee I was, I asked a guy one day, while we were sitting at a bar in Adelaide, “how come you don’t call that car a Rabbit?”

I nearly got the beer mug in my face. And since beer is sacred in Australia, and not to be spilled, that was a measure of the joker’s irritation with me. About the only intelligible words in the torrent of noise thrown my way (along with the beer) were “damned rodents!” And as I became aware of the damage that rabbits can cause to pasture, I got to calling them “damned rodents” too. Lumped in with those rats and mice and beavers and groundhogs, and all those other buck-toothed menaces to grass and trees and corn and beans.

Until … I told you I am a scientist, right? Studying the diversity and evolutionary history of life on earth, right? Along with a bunch of other guys and gals of like mind? Some of whom decided, one fine day, to ask “is a rabbit a rodent?” So they got a lot of rabbits, and a lot of rodents, and they did a lot of DNA sequencing. And when they were done, they decided that the rabbits belonged, not to the rodents, but to the lagomorphs.

Which means, Gertrude, that a rabbit is … wait for it … a rabbit. Is a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit is, yeah, you can stop now.

Oh. The Hindi word for “rabbit” is khargosh. Hare Khargosh. Khargosh khargosh, hare hare. Doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Want to watch me pull a hare out of my hat?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

OK, I’m too lazy to write. Actually, begging your pardon, it’s like this: my employers are insisting I take a work break. The best I can do right now is re-runs. You wish new stuff from us, go here. She has dragon. I has draggin’.

The post below first appeared on Felloffatruck Publications on 9 March 2008. Five months later, and nothing has changed. Except possibly the profits of every insecticide maker with a distributor on O‘ahu.

=========================

Yep, that’s right. We live in a haunted house.

You don’t hear too much about haunted houses here in Hawai‘i, I reckon. I never did. Most probably ’cause the place is notoriously short on dark and stormy nights. Scary stories around here tend to be daylight tales, featuring big guys with big eyes and even bigger spears, Britney, who are inviting you to be the centerpiece at dinner tonight.

But it is what it is. We’ve got ghosts.

No, we didn’t see any ethereal sheets floating about the place. Nor did anything come hoo-ing into the bedroom at three in the morning.

What tipped us off was the sight of objects crossing our faux-wood floor. Things that shouldn’t .. be .. moving .. by .. themselves …

And then came the day when one of us reached for a snack. And discovered that .. someone .. had .. been .. into .. the .. cookies …

So. Who you gonna call? Eh?

Nah.

These are our ghosts.

Ghost ants. Tapinoma melanocephalum, to be formal. Tiny little things whose little white behinds blend into the woodword. They’re practically invisible except when they’re getting into things they’re not supposed to. The cookie jar, for instance. By the millions – which is how many worker ants one of their supercolonies contains.

I sometimes worry that if I somehow were to kill them all (and trust me, they cause me to reveal my inner Dalek), we’d be in trouble, ’cause we’d discover that they’d been holding hands and keeping the building from collapsing. And they’re one of the (at last count) 47 species of ants on these islands. Most of them pestiferous. And all of them haoles.

Hey. I’m supposed to be a scientist. No supernatural beings need apply, remember? What were you thinking?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Yes, again with the reposts. This one from Felloffatruck Publications on 3 December 2007.

The greenies will be furious about this. Already are, those that know about it. But this move has been in the cards for a long time. And let’s face it, no one, including the greenies, really cares a whit about endangered species. They’ve been political footballs since before somebody figured out that making pigskin hurts pigs, and designed replacements manufactured from petroleum … (oops). If we actually paid attention to what’s needed to keep species from going extinct …

======================

Awhile ago (I’d, ah, rather not put a number on that), I was talking with a scientific colleague about conservation. Specifically, about the conservation of living species. About the scientific rationale for the money that goes into publicly and privately sponsored programs to keep things like the furbish’s lousewort from going extinct. Or the New Zealand black robin, which, thanks to a significant outpouring of funds and human energy, and the reproductive prowess of two of the five(!) surviving birds, had just been saved …

“For what?” my colleague snapped.

“Whaddaya mean, ‘what?’”, I gasped, thinking that my colleague’s soul had suddenly been snatched away, and I was talking with the shade of a man who would have shot the last six passenger pigeons for his taxidermy shop.

“What are we going to do with it?” he shot back. “It’s a tiny, basically flightless bird that nests on the ground and couldn’t recognize a cat or a rat if its life depended on it. And there are cats and rats everyplace now. Its habitat is gone. When a species loses its place to live, and can’t adapt to a new one, it goes extinct. Species without places to live have been going extinct for billions of years. Except we saved this one. So what are we going to do with it?”

He had a point. A good point. And when I mentioned it, he, being a gentleman, refrained from asking me whether it was really that conspicuous.

He reminded me of tropical rainforests, which have more species per square metre than anywhere else on earth. (No jokes about round meters, please, and kindly keep your stinky square feet to yourself. Must be hell, trying to stand and walk on those things.) Lots of people talk about trying to save tropical rainforest species. All those parrots, and orchids, and gaudy frogs, and fish that look like they’re trying to be neon lights.

But once you’ve got one saved, what are you going to do with it?

Making a living as a species in a tropical rainforest isn’t exactly sunset on the lanai of your beachfront cottage, sipping mai tais and watching the surf. It’s more like the 17th floor of a Waikiki hotel at the height of tourist season. It’s crowded in there, man. Not to mention noisy. And with all that competition for space and food, you have to be pretty savvy, not to mention creative, to keep your room and still have a few bucks in your pocket for dinner.

For example. There’s a group of orchids in tropical rainforests (and some other places) that has figured out a way to keep unwanted bugs off its flowers. Now, keeping unwanted bugs off your flowers is not a trivial matter. Unwanted bugs might eat the flower outright, or steal the pollen or the nectar. This is not the way to go about ensuring that you will have descendants to argue over the provisions of your will.

So these orchid flowers look just like wasps. Female wasps, no less. They even smell like female wasps. Naturally, the only things that will have anything at all to do with the flowers are male wasps. Which, um, try to do them. But instead of sticking anything, they themselves get stuck.

You think I’m kidding?!?

This gets crazier. Say you have one orchid species, which is [ahem] visited by one wasp species. But over time, this species develops two populations, one living on mountainsides and the other by the shores of the lowland lakes. The flowers of these two populations start to differ from each other. So much so that populations of wasps start preferring to visit one or the other. Sooner or later, the wasps from the mountainsides will stop visiting the flowers by the lakesides, and vice versa. The result is two species of orchids. And two species of wasp.

This kind of thing goes on all the time in a tropical rainforest. Species using the subtlest of clues to differentiate themselves from one another, and dragging other species that are dependent on them along for the ride. It makes the rainforest a grand biodiversity engine, creating species far faster than it destroys them.

Until someone comes along with bug spray. Maybe bug spray is not such a big deal in a nice North American field of daisies. Any old bug can fertilize a daisy. Hell, most daisies will fertilize themselves. Now you know, temperate North American / European homeowner, why the battle for the front yard always seems to wind up Dandelions 1, Lawn 0. But in a tropical rainforest, where everything’s a specialist that’s dependent on everything else, and has evolved that way over millions of years of the kind of species splitting I described for the wasp orchids, a generalized insecticide could wipe out a hundred species of pollinating insects. Which will wipe out a hundred species of plants wholly dependent on those insects for pollination. Which will wipe out other species dependent on the existence of those plants for food or shelter.

Which can turn a lush tropical rainforest into a desert virtually overnight. Sure, you might save some species out of that rainforest. But what will you do with them? You wish to spend the rest of your life pretending to be a male wasp?

Now, if you thought I got started on this subject because I just returned from a field trip to a coral reef and I’ve got species on the brain, you’d certainly have reason to think so. And you’d be wrong. What happened was, I was reading an article in the newspaper about how the U. S. Government needed to spend money on somethingorother. And I was thinking “Fine. And the cash for this is coming from where? Wouldn’t it be nice if Our Elected Representatives could train themselves to ask on our behalf, We can’t have this $X budget item unless we can subtract $X from the budget someplace else?“

And then I realized. Our Elected Representatives can’t do this. They try it, they’ll get their bums tossed out onto the Mall. Each and every pot of government money, and private profit, is an island of resources, each with its own community that has come to depend upon that island. And none of those islands can be touched, less worse befall.

Y’see, gone are the days when the same man could clear the back 40; hunt, kill, dress, cook, and serve the venison lurking around his farm; bathe and change the baby; read Shakespeare at the grange hall on Wednesday night (Saturday night being reserved for the tavern). Now we’re all specialists, each with our role. Like standing in an upscale shopping mall, day after day, hawking wind spinners to the promenaders in Waikiki. Each new niche increasingly dependent on its neighbors, its supporters, its competitors.

Which is all fine. Until there’s a plague of beasts. Lions, perhaps. Or geckos. Or transformers . Who knock out the bottom of the deck of cards and send the whole house crashing in upon itself. Leaving only rubble, and then lone and level sands. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings …

Perhaps you can save a windspinner out of the rubble. But what would you do with it?

Let us hope that, despite the thunder on the horizon, tonight, the lion remains asleep.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.