CB and the dodo bird - Sep 19

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and CB (i.e. Colossal Biosciences, if someone is confused), is intent on making it worse, apparently.

With the grey/dire wolves, they actually have something: three grey wolf puppies (Arctic wolf subspecies, most likely), with some biological & anatomical modifications that are supposed to make them more like the extinct dire wolves. Lately, the news of those three are rare, hopefully, then, they have not died on CB’s watch.

With the moa birds, CB ignored the fact that we still have samples of the moa birds’ skins, feathers, and the like, and proclaimed that they will hybridize the Australian emu with the South American tinamous, and release the new hybrids into the New Zealand wilds. This movie is of a dubious legality, but the fact that there is no guarantee that the resulting hybrid ratites will be viable supersedes that. Therefore, lately, the commotion around the would-be revived moa birds is dying down, and CB’s celebrity sponsors, such as Sir Peter Jackson, (who made the ‘Hobbit’ and LotR movie trilogies), are keeping quiet.

Now, (September 2025), CB is launching yet another proclamation: they recovered some sort of primeval pigeon gene that will allow them to recreate the dodo. CB just needs chicken eggs. Pause.

The dodo were pigeons. They were very specialized pigeons, they had their own subtribe, and their closest relative was the solitaire, another specialized flightless species that died in the 17^th century as well. Their closest living relatives belong to the pigeon tribe Raphini, whose members are relatively big and bulky, especially for flying birds.

…The Columbidae birds (pigeons, doves, etc.) come in two main varieties: sleek and streamlined, or big and bulky. The dodo and the solitaire were two extremes of the second variety, but their living relatives, such as the Nicobar pigeon and the crowned pigeons, also tend to be heavyset, though nowhere as extreme as their extinct kin was. Where do the chickens enter?

Nowhere, that is the thing. Chickens are gamebirds, members of the Galliformes order, completely separate from the aforementioned pigeons, doves and co.; the chicken and the pigeon may look superficially similar to each other, but they are just as closely related as the red fox and the hedgehog – i.e. not at all aside from the most basic ties. To use chicken eggs (and genes?) to bring back the dodo is about as logical as using elephants to bring back the Smilodon.

As for the primeval pigeon genes/genomes/etc. …The name alone is rather unfortunate and populistic – and also vague and generalized. CB gives no concrete guarantee that using this technique will bring back the dodo precisely and not something else entirely. A creation of a brand-new pigeon species, flightless or not, would be exciting, but it would not be re-wilding, not really. Rather, it would be playing God with life (with birds, to be more specific), and that is something else. Of course, whether CB would go this course, and not just take the sponsors’ money and run, is another question…

So, to recap: in a matter of years, in less than a decade, CB went from something respectable to half-frauds and half-madmen, who have done science in general, and rewilding in particular, a bad service indeed. To make matters even worse for them, there is no real source of dodo DNA – a head and a leg is all that remained of a rather enchanting RL species; pity that it could not co-exist with humans and their companions, (such as domestic pigs turned feral, and rats). CB – or anyone else – just would not be able to acquire dodo genes at all, and what they are offering instead may just suffer from a bad, populist name, or perhaps CB is just pulling a completely banal, ordinary, con. The future will show. Real life seriously sucks, sometimes.

This is it for now – see you all soon!

 

'Anaconda'-2025 movie trailer - Sep 18

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, (mostly), so let us talk about the trailer to the 2025’s ‘Anaconda’ movie instead.

The original ‘Anaconda’ franchise was about people who came to the South American jungle for various reasons, and most of them would be eaten by an oversized anaconda (one or several) during the run time of the films, (there are several). Therefore, what makes this franchise better than the ‘Coyotes’ (remember them)?

The movies of the ‘Anaconda’ franchise, (including the one coming up in 2025), do not take themselves seriously and are not going for realism (or social commentary) the way that ‘Coyotes’ (and ‘Death of a Unicorn’) do. Even the trailer shows that the movie is going to be ridiculous and hilarious in a good way, and the completely unreal anaconda is a part of it.

The green anaconda might be the biggest modern snake; only the reticulated python of the Asian tropics might be able to match it; and the king cobra, of course, is always worth a mention, but the king cobra is a venomous snake among its’ other qualities, while the anacondas are constrictors.

‘Anacondas’ are used as a plural because ‘anaconda’ is a name of a genus of constrictor snakes, also known as the water boas. Just how many species of anaconda there actually are, is debated; two are known for sure – the green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) and the yellow (Eunectes notaeus) are confirmed and recognized; the rest are up to debate, (and one is a fossil species anyhow, which just makes everything more complex).

Usually, the people talk about ‘THE anaconda’, or, more precisely, the bigger and more massive green anaconda of Brazil, Peru, French Guiana, Suriname and Bolivia; the smaller yellow anaconda lives mainly more to the east (the two species do co-exist in Brazil), and the rest of the anaconda clan do not matter right now. What matters is that the green anaconda can be big and impressive, yet it is nowhere near the size of the mythical snake monsters that haunt the West imagination ever since the Europeans began to colonize South America. The South American rainforest is larger than life even now, so naturally it has to be inhabited by larger than life monsters. The Native Americans of South America agreed, but their monsters are much less realistic than the oversized anaconda of the European colonists and their descendants is, so let us put them aside too.

Besides the CGI Titanoboa wannabe, the trailer shows the cast handling (and accidentally killing) some other non-venomous snake, probably a boa constrictor. When put face to face, the boa is much slimmer and smaller than the green anaconda is, but like all the constrictor snakes, it has a mouthful of hook-like, needle-sharp, backwards pointing teeth, and it can deliver very painful and bloody bites too, so it should never be taken for granted.

…The cast go to the American tropics with a ‘movie budget’ under 10 000 dollars. Again, there is no realism; they want to make an ‘indie film’ (a movie within a movie – that is quite clever, in fact); so why not go to Florida, (or perhaps California) is unknown. As RL shows, there are plenty of escaped pythons, (some of which are quite large), in Florida, so an anaconda would fit in as well, but no – it is South America or bust. Anything else?

Just that after their boa is lost (it falls in the water, where the piranhas get it, or the boat propeller does, or something), the cast go into the rainforest to find a replacement snake. Suspension of disbelief and all, but the way they were doing it would have resulted in them finding a venomous snake instead, most likely, and most of the South American venomous snakes are pit vipers, too. Just think rattlesnakes without the rattles, really. (In all of South America lives a single rattlesnake species – all the rest are natives of North America instead). A bite from anyone of them would have been bad – period. In a certain light, the cast of the ‘Anaconda’-2025 are lucky that the snake they confronted was a non-venomous type.

And again, given just how unrealistic this movie’s snake monster is, it just as well could have been a giant bear, (the spectacled bear of South America is not as large as the brown bear is, but it can kill adult livestock with blows of its’ paws), or even a horde of orcs – why not? How is a kaiju-sized snake more realistic than a horde of orcs?

It is not, but the cast make it work. Even in the trailer, they are clearly having fun and are not careening all over the place as ‘Coyotes’ script (and cast) do. ‘Anaconda’-2025 does not have any ‘special’ message as the other film does, but I daresay that it will be more enjoyable and fun to watch than ‘Coyotes’ will be.

…And as for ‘Marvel™ Zombies’, coming to the viewers on Sep 24, 2025? Looks as if they are designed to cover up for the ‘Eyes of Wakanda’ just as the ‘Eyes’ did for ‘Ironheart’. Again: ‘Ironheart’ was bad, perhaps not as bad as Disney’s ‘Snow White’ remake, but still bad, hitting all the right notes in all the wrong ways. For Disney, MCU, and the rest, good relationships with Afro-Americans are important, so they covered-up (and replaced) ‘Ironheart’ with ‘Eyes’.

However, ‘Eyes’ themselves were something of a rushed job, and people have felt it. Disney/MCU do not like confrontations, so they are using ‘Zombies’ to cover-up ‘Eyes’. ‘Zombies’ themselves, of course, are strongly reminiscent of ‘Game of Thrones’ series finale, when the heroes of Westeros found themselves confronting the Night King and his cohorts, including the walking dead – but let’s wait until Sep 24, 2025, to see the ‘Marvel™ Zombies for ourselves first).

…And yes, in early 2000s, ‘Animal Face-Off’ had a ‘jaguar vs. anaconda’ episode where the anaconda won. Sadly, it is only slightly more realistic than the upcoming ‘Anaconda’-2025 film will be, so let us discuss it some other time.

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!

'Coyotes' the moviie trailer - Sep 9

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but then I watched the trailer for the upcoming 2025 ‘Coyotes’ movie and realize that Hollywood can suck even worse. Let us discuss.

First, why wolves are known to be man-eaters (in the past, however distant), and coyotes are not? Frankly because they do not have the strength. A grey wolf (not to be confused with several other canine/lupine species) and a coyote look superficially similar, but the wolf is much more formidable.

A coyote – on average – is about 1 m in length, (without the tail) and weighs about 16 kg. A grey wolf, on the other hand, is about 1.5 m in length (also without the tail) and weighs about 60 kg. Most of this weight comes from muscle, and a wolf’s skull and jaws are wider and stronger than those of the coyote are; a coyote is more of a precise strike carnivore, and a grey wolf aims for greater mass damage instead.

Again, how do carnivorous mammals kill? In general, (there are always exceptions), they either go for a precise strike (on the throat, more rarely on the muzzle or even the skull), or, conversely, they bite and tear – tear off pieces of flesh, live… You need physical strength in both of these scenarios, of course, but the second one requires a much stronger bite, and a much stronger (and durable) body to handle such rough hunting. Lions, spotted hyenas, and grey wolves have it, and they all hunt big prey – African buffalo, antelopes, and deer (including the elk and sometimes the moose), in case of the wolves.

By contrast, the jackal and the red fox, the coyote and the striped & brown hyena do not normally hunt big animals; they prefer to scavenge, or to eat smaller prey, such as rodents, rabbits, and hares. The hyenas, true, have a more powerful bite than their canine counterparts do, but they are still at half the size of the spotted hyena, and in general defer to it, when they encounter it.

The ancestor of the more successful spotted hyena drove the ancestors of the striped and brown hyenas into the African deserts, and sort of forced the ancestor of the aardwolf to become an obligate insectivore – but we digress.

…Only not, for in North America the relationship between grey wolves and coyotes isn’t unlike that of… lions and spotted hyenas, for example, only more one-sided: the wolves’ tower over their coyote cousins, they are much stronger and heavier than the coyotes are, and they hunt in large packs, while coyotes hunt in pairs or alone. There is footage – from the Yellowstone Park – of wolves killing coyotes in packs. One on one, a wolf might let a coyote be; a wolf pack will make short work of it.

Enter humans. They drove the grey wolf to extinction in the North American East, and in the West its’ population is still reduced. The coyote adapted and flourished alongside humans, (as did the raccoon and the red fox)… but there were no cases of attacks on humans by any of them, (unless rabies or a similar factor was involved). The coyote may look like a wolf, generally, but unlike the wolf, it is not mentally wired to tackle prey as big as an adult human being… Enter the coydog.

It is exactly what it sounds like – it is a hybrid of a domestic dog, (either intentionally or a feral animal), and a coyote. Just like its’ bigger cousin the wolfdog, this hybrid seems to be quite fertile, (but then again, the question if the domestic dog an independent species, a subspecies of the grey wolf, or just a domesticated wolf with artificially derived physical differences is still open), and is doing well enough in North America.

The American coyote is not known to be a man-eater. The Australian dingo, (again, either a domestic dog turned wild, a separate species, a subspecies, or something else entirely), is. In addition, unlike the coyote it hunts in packs, as the grey wolf – or the feral populations of the domestic dog – do. More succinctly, the dingo is not as big as the grey wolf is, but it can be dangerous to people, and sometimes, it is.

Now, in North America, we get cases of domestic dogs interbreeding with grey wolves and especially coyotes – and unlike them, domestic dogs are not afraid of humans. Oh, they are peoples’ best friends, but with a metaphorical switch, they can be their worst enemies instead. When they attack, the results are bad and often deadly for the humans. You put in coyote, let alone grey wolf DNA into the mix, and the result is worse – but where does it leave the upcoming ‘Coyotes’ movie?

‘Coyotes’ apparently aims to be a social satire or something else, not unlike how ‘The Death of a Unicorn’ was. (Remember that sad pile of horse apples?) Fair enough, and the script is intentionally screwy and unrealistic – but the poor coyotes. Moreover, my point is that if they renamed the film ‘Coydogs’, and had not purebred coyotes, but coyote-feral dog crossbreeds, it would have worked just as well, and been more accurate, so there is that. The movie cast and crew decided that that would be too much effort, so we will probably end up with some anti-coyote hysteria, something that we do not really need right now – but it is real life. It sucks.

This is it for now – see you all soon!

Hyenas (and Zombies) - Sep 08

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, therefore I was going to talk about the upcoming Marvel™ Zombies special, but then Textbooks Travels YouTube channel presented a video about five hyena species, including the one new species, and I had to watch – hyenas are some of my favorite animals, you know?

Anyhow, after going through about 30 minutes of video footage of the various hyena, team TT finally reached the supposed new species in question – and it is the aardwolf. Pause.

Here is the thing. There are four modern species of hyena, and they are all specialists in their unique ways, all are different from each other in various different ways. In case of the aardwolf, it is the smallest and the weakest hyena species, one that is specialized in feeding on ants and termites, it is an unassuming and nocturnal animal, most people in Africa (especially the not-tourists) are ignoring or just unaware of it, and for the rest of the world, the situation is not much better. That is one.

Two is that there are two aardwolf subspecies. Pause.

Let us backtrack a bit. Out of the four modern hyena species, the spotted and the brown hyenas are monotypic; there is just one species of each without any greater genetic variation. With the striped hyena and the aardwolf, the situation is different. The striped hyena has up to five subspecies, but they all differ from each other mostly by where they live – from northern Africa (the Sahara desert) to Middle East, to Central Asia, to India, (mostly the north-east – like its’ sister species the brown hyena, the striped hyena is primarily a desert dweller/specialist). The aardwolf is less extreme, but it too has two subspecies – one in east Africa and the second in the south Africa – that have some minor physical differences, and thus they are two separate subspecies – but they differ from each other primarily by where they live. Team TT took this concept and proclaimed that no, the two populations are two different species of the aardwolf (aka two different hyena species), but so far there’s no consensus on that, so I’m going to call out them (him) and say that their proclamation about there being five hyena species in the modern world is wrong. Anything else?

…The aardwolf really got the short end of the stick in the TT hyena video – it had the least amount of footage & screen time, it had to share with the bat-eared fox. The two are not related at all, the hyenas are part of the cat half of the mammal carnivore family tree, and the wild dogs are the more ancient clan out of the two. That is part of the reason as to why wild dogs are found all over the world these days, (excluding Antarctica), while the hyenas are not. Just like some of their cat cousins, they tried to imitate the dogs, to try to beat them at their own game – and outside of Africa, they failed. The spotted hyena is as a formidable a pack hunter as any dog, but it is savannah animal, unlike the brown and striped hyenas (or the big cats such as the lion and the leopard); it does not do well in the desert, it cannot cross the Sahara into Eurasia. The brow hyena, of course, is hemmed in by the two oceans on one hand, and it does not enter the savannah, because there it would be outcompeted by the local predators/scavengers before it reached the African east (where Africa is connected to Eurasia). The striped hyena is already there, of course, but it is half the size and muscle of the spotted hyena and just like the brown hyena, it is a desert specialist and does not enter more fertile areas, (such as the Southeast Asian jungles, for example). In addition, the aardwolf is an insectivore, it feeds on insects and as long as they are plentiful, (and they are), it is happy. So is the bat-eared fox, of course, but we are talking hyenas here, not foxes and other wild dogs.

…The point here is that without humans being in the picture, the hyenas are doing just fine, even though about 87.5% of their global population is in Africa. By living there, they avoid competing for food resources with the wild dogs, and thus both them and the wild canines are satisfied.

In addition, where does it leave the Marvel™ zombies? In their own part of MCU multiverse, of course – they were introduced In Marvel’s™ now finished ‘What if?’ animated series, and it will be somewhat interesting to see as to how Earth-89521 will deal with the undead threat. The hyenas, in fact, should be of little help there – the aardwolf is an insectivore and does not eat carrion to begin with, the spotted hyena prefers to hunt live prey, and the brown and the striped hyenas, while scavengers, are nowhere as formidable as it is. Therefore, the humans of that dimension will have to defeat the zombies one way or another, mostly by themselves – and we will have to wait until September 24, 2025 to see how it plays out…

Well, this is it for now, see you all soon.