D:BA and dire wolves - April 9

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but then Colossal Biosciences Company threw dire wolves at us. Pause.

Initially, I intended to discuss the penultimate S1 Daredevil episode, which had Bullseye coming back, and Murdock (Daredevil) taking a bullet for Fisk (Kingpin) because of reasons? Apparently? Does anyone care about those two anymore anyhow? Dire wolves are more interesting than MCU, these days.

…Of course, these days, at least some news outlets discuss with an authentic feeling, who makes a better jam and/or spread – king Charles III of Great Britain or Megan Markle, his younger daughter-in-law. Seriously, and compared to this sort of news, MCU’s D: BA show is cutting-edge political drama or something along those lines. Nevertheless, what about the dire wolves?

…I am a sceptic when it came to CB’s claims. See, while the RL dire wolf (let us leave Westeros out of this, the topic is already quite confusing), is a true canine, (as opposed to a bear-dog, a bear, or any other kind of mammal carnivore), it also belonged to a completely different genus than the modern wolves do. However, so what?

See, even CB admits (sort of) that their dire wolves – Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi – are not exactly purebred dire wolves, more like grey wolf/dire wolf hybrids. Eh? The problem with that statement that in nature hybrids occur only between animals that share the same genus, albeit belonging to different species. Pause.

Let us try again. We are talking only about mammals here; in other animal groups, such as birds (say, songbirds), or amphibians (such as the tailed salamanders) the hybrid situation might be quite different, but along the mammals? Either it works or it does not.

See for yourselves. On one hand, we have horses and donkeys, whose hybrids are sterile and can’t really make a new species; big cats, whose hybrids aren’t sterile but can’t survive in the wild due to health-related reasons; and the two species of the gnu antelope, whose hybrid offspring also aren’t sterile but have plenty of health defects that they die quickly enough. Pause.

On other hand, we have the beluga and the narwhale whales, for example, or the better-known polar and grizzly brown bears, whose hybrid offspring are viable and are increasing in numbers. The wolf branch of the wild dog family, incidentally, is in this boat too, as the various coyote/grey wolf/domestic dog hybrids of eastern North America are growing more numerous and are establishing their own independent populations…

That said, those wild dogs are all in the Canis genus, while the extinct dire wolf is not, not anymore, at least not at the moment. In addition, if you look at the related animals that belong to different genera, they do not form hybrids – just look at rhinos or elephants, for example. African and Asian elephants do not hybridize, not even in captivity, unlike the big cats, and the black and white rhinos of Africa do not hybridize – unlike the feral domestic dogs and the Ethiopian wolf. The latter is a separate, albeit related, species to the grey wolf of the northern hemisphere – the term ‘wolf’ covers almost two dozen animal species, living and extinct, most of whom are related to each other (i.e. they’re canines), but some are not…

Where were we? Right, the DNA of the dire wolf isn’t in as a good a condition as that of the woolly mammoth is – what’s left of the dire wolf are mainly fossilized bones, teeth, and the like. Extracting DNA from them, even if the dire wolf was in the same genus as the grey wolf, doesn’t guarantee success; the fact that the surrogate mothers were domestic dogs, aka a third canine species, separate from the other two (I’m going with this theory), only complicated the situation: how did their pregnancies go? How did the births go? Did the mothers survive or not? However, no, all we get are sterilized reports of a success, and automatic reactions to those reports. Neither is a reliable source of information and so far no one outside of CB has much to go on. Still…

Remember Ms. Nicole from my last week’s entry? Or rant, whatever. As it was said, she was hired by CB, or something similar to make six videos about mass extinctions; so far, two of them were aired, but we talked about this; the point is that one would expect her to jump onto the dire wolf promotion bandwagon, because CB are her employers or something, but no. She is keeping mum about them instead and seems to have outright distanced herself from the CB. Does she know something about this that we do not? Maybe, maybe not, but I, for one, am sceptical of just what CB’s latest wolf pups are. Real life does suck, but sometimes it is less sucky and more complex and complicated instead…

This is it for now. See you all soon!

About super-sized sauropods

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so we will talk about a magazine – i.e., ‘Scientific American’ – instead.

There is an article in the ‘Scientific American’ Sep 2023 issue, discussing sauropod dinosaurs and as to why some of them got super-big. The author proclaims that it is a mystery; I am no paleontologist, but I feel that I have a theory, here: it was a number of factors.

Why do animals do anything? Moreover, why do they evolve in the wild? To secure an advantage over competitors and predators/prey; a bigger body size is par de course here.

What are the advantages of being big, (super-big)? You get access to food sources that are unavailable to other herbivores, and predators are not as big of a threat to you, (pun intended). Conversely, though, you also need more food than the other herbivores do, and carnivores will eventually evolve their own adaptations, physical or behavioristic, that will even the score between them and a super-big herbivore. Let us widen the query.

What are the factors that allow the initial growth of super-size? An abundance of food, plant matter in the sauropods’ case. Wait. There is an arms’ race between plants and herbivores, just as there is one between them and the carnivores. In addition, just as some herbivores, (i.e. African [and Asian] elephants), get big to escape predators, (i.e. African lions and tigers), so do some plants get big in an attempt to ‘escape’ the elephants, (such as the baobab trees). The twist? This strategy does not work on all of the levels: under right conditions, elephants can bring down a baobab tree, (literally, topple it over), while a pride of lions can bring down an African elephant, (again under right conditions and circumstances). What is absent here?

Space. The more space there is, the more individual specimens of any given species occupy it. True, it does not necessarily mean getting big: a pine tree in a forest grows tall and thin, with its’ top high above the ground – a pine tree in a clearing grows shorter and squatter, with its’ top spread out wider than its’ crowded counterpart’s… but we digress. The point of this discussion is that just as modern elephants, (and baobab trees), got big because of several factors, so did the prehistoric sauropods…and trees, (or tree-like plants), that they ate. What else?

Right, not all of the sauropods evolved into super-sized plant eaters, some remained smaller. What about it?

First: sauropods evolved as bulk-feeders: their teeth and jaws were not designed for chewing, but for stripping foliage from branches, and for uprooting other plants whole. Another part of the reason as to why sauropods became the largest of the dinosaurs, extinct and modern, was because they had to become big to accommodate large and massive digestive systems that were almost constantly busy, because foliage, (as well as grass), isn’t very nutritious at all, and it has to be consumed in large amounts to satisfy not just hunger, but nutritious requirements of an organism.

Well, yes, but again, not all of the herbivorous dinosaurs got so big: even Jurassic ornithischians, such as Stegosaurus, never got as big as the sauropods did. That is correct, and it is competition again: by becoming big, the sauropods overshadowed their competitors: they could feed in places unavailable to the bird-hipped herbivores, and they were relatively immune to attacks to such theropods as Allosaurus, Torvosaurus, and Saurophaganax. That said, there was differentiation between the Jurassic sauropods themselves: some, like Diplodocus, were longer than they were tall, and their hips were taller than their shoulders – these dinosaurs could sit down on their hind legs alone, (forming a tripod with their tails), and be, well, construction cranes.

Other sauropods, like Brachiosaurus, were taller than they were long, and their shoulders were taller than their hips. They probably could also form a fulcrum tripod, but less well than Diplodocus and its’ relatives could, not that they needed too – they already were tall, taller than Diplodocus normally was.

Finally, there were less specialized sauropods, such as Camarasaurus, which were neither too tall nor too long, but just big, and fed on whatever Diplodocus would feed, but less well, and on whatever Brachiosaurus would feed, but less well. What is the moral?

We move on from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous and the world of the dinosaurs’ changes. The single super-continent of the Triassic and part of the Jurassic is gone, there are now two landmasses, Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south, and they are splitting as well. In the north, sauropods are practically gone, with some singular generalized species, such as Alamosaurus, remaining. In the south, they are flourishing, however…

However, Gondwana would eventually fall apart, as did Laurasia. The latter formed Eurasia and North America; the former – Africa, Australia, Antarctic, and South America, and it is in the last continent that the sauropods would reach their last peak of variety. Why? Because there were fewer bird-hipped dinosaurs in South America than elsewhere. In Africa and Australia, for example, there were such dinosaurs as Ouranosaurus and Muttaburrasaurus, smaller plant-eaters that were intermediate between the earlier iguanodonts and the true hadrosaurs, (like Edmontosaurus). If the sauropods depended on their guts to grind down and digest their food, the bird-hipped dinosaurs, (and especially the hadrosaurs and their kin), had more effective chewing systems than the sauropods did; they were better adapted to digest the new plants, (the first flowering plants appeared in the Early Cretaceous, just as the sauropods began to disappear), and they were able to outcompete the sauropods – just enough for them to die-out first, before the theropods and the bird-hipped herbivores, and before the K/T extinction.

In South America, it was slightly different. There, the sauropods remained dominant herbivores, and they began to compete with each other. As a result, some became extra-large, just as the African bush elephants are today. Others remained small; some, like Amargasaurus developed spiny crests, while others, like Saltasaurus, evolved bony armor, reminiscent of Ankylosaurus and co. These adaptations were defense mechanisms against their predators – carnosaurs, (Giganotosaurus and co.), and abelisaurs, (Abelisaurus and co.). Did they work…technically they did, though most paleontological texts give-off a feeling that the South American sauropods died-out before the K/T Extinction, again. Also, the biggest sauropods of them all, such as Argentinosaurus, never developed any bony armor or spikes or anything – it was too big to need this sort of armor, and not even the biggest South American theropods, (Mapusaurus, Giganotosaurus, etc.) were able to take it down…unless the circumstances were just in their favor.

Pause. We have come full circle. A learned person, a publicator in ‘Scientific American’ proclaimed that there is no idea as to why some sauropods became super-sized. For the same reason that some of the mammals did during the Cenozoic – to get advantage over their competitors, over their carnivores, and over their food source… and at the same time, to keep themselves alive and breeding, because bulk-food feeding comes with its own catches. Not such a mystery after all.

End

 

Loki, 'The Nexus Event' - June 30

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Just ask the NatGeo magazine – in their July 2021 article about the Kenyan fossils they talk about ‘elephant relatives called proboscideans’, and all that I can say is: oh, for fuck’s sake! ‘Proboscideans’ are a taxonomic term that acts as an ‘umbrella’ that contains both the modern elephants and their extinct cousins, (the mammoths, the mastodons, and beyond). To call proboscideans ‘elephant relatives’ is just wrong, as the modern elephants, (the Asian and two African species), themselves are proboscideans. NatGeo once used to be a standard for scientific prestige and accuracy, and now that is gone. ‘Elephant relatives called proboscideans’ indeed!

…On to the more pleasant topics? This week’s ‘Loki’ episode, ‘The Nexus Event’ is…officially mediocre, as the show’s crew, apparently, just could not figure out the pacing in the show’s first season.

Let us elaborate, (if that is possible). From the start, Disney/MCU tried to downplay ‘Loki’; possibly because the titular character (characters?) are bisexual, and Disney hates controversy these days, and not just because it costs them money, but because. They just hate it after the entire SW, and MCU, and other messes. What next?

Well, again, I want to blame the troubles of ‘Loki’ on Disney/MCU trying to not have their LGBTQ+ cake and eat it too, but the truth is that the LGBTQ+ elements are minor in ‘Loki’, and the show itself suffers… from clunky, awkward plot. Loki and Sylvie’s entire side trip to Lamentis proved to be a monumental red herring; perhaps the duo needed to really bond, and there are few better bonding events than an apocalypse, (cough Thanos cough), but somehow ‘Loki’ the TV series mishandles this, by making Lamentis look like an unnecessary side trip from the TVA.

The TVA itself… I am no Loki, (though the post-credits scene introduced several more to the show), but I began to suspect that something was wrong with the TVA from the start; it was just too grand to be true, and now that the space lizard-gods proved to be robots… people aren’t being too surprised. Moreover, judge RnR is based on a character who has been associated with Conq the Kangaroo… I mean, Kang the Conqueror, who is a known villain in the Marvel Comics, so this sudden turn of events is not too sudden either.

In addition, Loki’s death? Also more dramatic than surprising, not to mention that I, for one, am kind of inured to this shit after the AoS’ S5 finale: they tried to make Fitz’s and Coulson’s demise oh so dramatic… and then they turned around and practically resurrected Fitz in S6, and as for Coulson and his look-alikes in AoS’ S6 & S7… don’t start.

‘Loki’, conversely, went in the other direction – all of the Lokis introduced in this series, (including Sylvie), are different from each other…and it will be interesting to see as to how the titular Loki figures out as to how to handle them, and how to deal with them, and so on. Straightforward enough, only ‘Loki’ the TV series does not deal with straightforward. Pause.

In AoS, the plot lines overindulged in twists and turns, especially in the first seasons…but regardless of this overindulgence, the overall plot still marched forward, from point A to point B, to oversimplify the situation. In ‘Loki’, conversely, the plot doesn’t go anywhere, it just circles around a single point – the TVA – and all the twists and turns serve even less purpose than they did in AoS, as they don’t progress the overall plot at all, but only make it more muddled. Anything else?

Ah, yes, back to the characters’ deaths. AoS already made a mockery of this aspect of MCU at the S5 finale, but ‘Loki’ took it one step further: apparently, all of the characters that are ‘killed’, or ‘deleted’, by TVA, don’t really die, but rather end up in some sort of a limbo, which is rather reminiscent of an apocalyptic NYC, (cough, the first Avengers’ movie, cough). I.e. instead of dying, Loki has found even more allies for himself, and whatever he will do now, he will do it with style and with help… (In theory about the last part). Anything else?

Sadly, no. Real life still sucks – a condo has collapsed in Florida, a man was attacked by a great white shark off the coast of California, (I believe), and yesterday we had to live through the mother of all the thunderstorms while dealing with a fire alarm. Put otherwise, my good readers, this is it for now – see you all soon!

Quarantine entry #88 - June 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but sometimes you get to see something new and unusual in it all the same. Case in point – bears, brown bears, to be more precise. For the last few days, Yahoo News and similar websites were discussing about the various mutant grizzlies that had appeared in the Banff national park. One is all white, (but not an albino, a different mutation). The second is still a cub, mostly brown, but with a white head, giving it a rather panda-like appearance. Cool, eh? But so what?

For one thing, it helps us to understand as to how the bears’ coloring scheme has evolved in general. With the exception of the giant panda, the modern bears are largely monochromatic, especially the American black, the brown, and the polar bears, but as those recent cases of mutated grizzlies showed, there are always exceptions to this rule, and just because a bear is supposed to be brown, (or black, or white, or etc.), doesn’t mean that it is going to be.

Yes, most discolored animals tend to die-off more quickly than their normal-colored counterparts for a variety of factors, but if an animal is large enough, (say, a sperm whale, or even ‘just’ an African bush elephant), then it may survive into adulthood and reproduce.

This is where it gets even trickier, because genetics. An animal’s coloration, (whether it is an elephant, a zebra, a hyena or a guinea pig), is defined by the DNA that it had inherited from its parents – usually. Sometimes the DNA misfires and we get albinos, leucistic animals, melanistic, (all black), and so on, but if they do reproduce, there is no indication that this genetic flaw will be inherited by its’ offspring, because the latter have different DNA – a mix from both parents, which changes the game entirely. Put otherwise, while breeding in captivity is one thing, (just look at all the breeds of domestic pigeons, geese, or even goldfish, for example), breeding in the wild is something else, and while it is possible that a ‘miscoloured’ animal will survive to sexual maturity, (as the first out of the two grizzlies in our case is a sexually mature animal and not just a cub), the odds of its’ offspring inheriting its’ atypical coloration is even less. What next?

Hard to say. For today, actually, I wanted to discuss the cockroaches. Yes, they are far less majestic than the bears are, but they are far, far older, having appeared back in the Mesozoic, during the Cretaceous period. Superficially, they are similar to beetles, but they are much less derived than the beetles are; whereas the beetles undergo a full metamorphosis, (rather like butterflies, honeybees, and flies), the cockroaches do not – their youngsters are not grubs like those of beetles, but are miniature versions of the adults.

Another important difference of cockroaches from beetles are the ooteca – whereas beetles just lay their eggs into rotting wood, ground, onto tree bark or someplace else, the cockroaches actually carry them in a sort of an ‘egg case’ until the eggs hatch and the young cockroaches scatter to begin their own lives.

…In any case, the physical similarity of cockroaches and beetles is superficial; whereas beetles are found all over the world, in all sorts of ecosystems, cockroaches are much more tropical, and in the wild are found usually in jungle ecosystems, or elsewhere wherever there is plenty of heat and moisture. Since their closest relatives are the termites, this does include underground. Pause.

…Termites deserve their own mention – sometimes they’re still called ‘the white ants’ because of their color, but they are very different insects from ants. Sometimes it’s obvious – the termite mounds are much bigger, in a different league altogether, from anthills, or hives of bees and wasps – and sometimes, not so much: whereas all worker ants, (wasps and bees), are all females, in the termite communities, both sexes are represented equally, plus worker and soldier termites are much more different from each other physically than those of ants or wasps.

Out of the two groups, the termites are the more derived ones, and may have involved from the cockroaches, (albeit different ones than those that live in human houses), but so far, no one knows for certain. Fossils of both cockroaches and termites are rare finds, so it is hard to make any decisive statements about them, at least right now.

…Moreover, for now, this is it. See you all soon instead.

Quarantine entry #87 - June 16

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. On the one hand, the official U.S.-Canada border will remain closed until July 21^st at least, because reasons. On the other,… wait.

…Let’s talk media, for a second. These days, at least some of mass media sites, such as Yahoo News, tend to illuminate such important events as the border closure and the prolonging of CERB very sparingly – they just tell us about the happening of one fact or another, and that is it. What and how it all went down – we do not know.

Instead, we are given brief polls on that site, basically the standard yes-or-no question with some minimal variations. Are those questions supposed to matter? In the West, true, people do believe that their opinions matter, but the fact is that if their opinions are handled in a sufficiently detached manner, then it suddenly becomes much harder to understand as to how precisely it does matter.

In the RF, the situation is different – people, the common people, know that the higher-ups in the Kremlin and etc. don’t care about their opinions, unless it is backed-up by force, so when they have enough, they go into the streets… therefore, the aforementioned higher-ups in the Kremlin and etc. do their best to appease their ‘electorate’ just enough to prevent the aforementioned revolution… usually. Right now, with their own COVID-19 epidemic on hands, this system is breaking down…sucks to be them…but real life sucks to begin with.

Elsewhere in the world, it is different. In the U.K., (and the rest of the EU), news about COVID-19 and the like are much more sparse than they are in the U.S. In Canada…well, we have just talked about how the Canadian government handles COVID-19 – apparently, they make all the decisions, but give polls to their electorate to reassure them that their opinion still matters and they can always vent, of course, online. Put otherwise, Canada may not be the RF, (thank God), but neither is it the U.S., (captain Obvious says ‘No duh!’). What next?

I admit that I wanted to talk to you about our old favorites, the elephants, today, but then I caught a glimpse of a cartoon. It was about bears, fair enough. The titular character is a grizzly bear, who used to be a circus actor slash jack-of-all-trades in his youth, but then settled down. He is also a bachelor, (because plot reasons), but has a girlfriend, also a grizzly/brown bear, who comes and goes throughout the show’s episodes. He also has a romantic rival, a male black bear, who is something of a jock, but who appears very rarely in the show, because it is a children’s cartoon… so what’s my point?

My point is that in this episode, the male grizzly’s old flame from the circus came to visit him. She was a spectacled bear from South America, a real party animal, (pun intended), and she is much smaller and more petite than the other bears of the show, (mostly brown and black, though there is a giant panda cub as a distant relative of the titular character too). And-?

And that is actually realistic – the spectacled bear is smaller than the brown bear is: about 120-200 cm, with the males being larger than the females are, (but that is a common trade of all the bears, especially the modern ones), and much heavier – up to 115 kg on average, while the female spectacled bears usually weigh – on average – only 65 kg. Apparently, this sort of discrepancy puts the spectacled bear right alongside the polar bear for being one of the most sexually dimorphic modern bear species, even though the latter is only a very distant cousin to the spectacled bear; both are true bears, of course, but the spectacled bear is much more closely related to the now-extinct giant short-faced bears of the previous epochs. (In particular, the short-faced bear Arctodus simus was featured in one episode of ‘Prehistoric Predators’, and had cameo appearances in some other, remember?) Ironically, however, diet-wise, the spectacled bear has only 5% of meat in his overall diet; it might be the next most herbivorous modern bear after the giant panda! Maybe that is how it was able to survive the last Ice Age when the short-faced bears died out, and keep in mind, that the American tropics are also home to the jaguar, which might be less physically formidable than the spectacled bear is, but much more formidable and carnivorous – the spectacled bear manages to avoid it by living in places where the jaguars are rare – mainly in the Andes mountains of north and west South America. If given the chance, spectacled bears are just as ecologically dexterous as the brown bears of the Northern hemisphere are, but these days, while the brown bears are Least Concern, the spectacled bears are Vulnerable instead, so there is that. Real life sucks for those fascinating creatures, it looks like, but that is real life.

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

Quarantine entry #71 - May 31

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Just look at all the excitement, (word used in a negative way), surrounding the demise of George Floyd. It is a horrible thing, an awful thing, something that gone down really wrong – and now the entire U.S. is shaking because of it. Why?

The answer, of course, is ‘why not’, deep beneath. The American society is exhausted by the lockdown/self-isolation/quarantine/etc., this process was already breaking down, when George Floyd died, and now it is being thrown out as the proverbial baby with the bathwater, in all of the- in everything. Some people, according to Associated Press, claim that it is all the ‘outsiders’ fault, but I say to them – look at the Donald. When Tayler Swift is schooling you, then you know that you are in the wrong.

No, really, Taylor Swift, who once got embroiled in a fight with the Kardashian-West clan, has a better grip on the situation than the Donald does – and meanwhile, shit is hitting the fan from Miami to Seattle. The governor of California is ordering a lockdown in L.A., (though not citywide, admittedly). Yeesh!

…And on the other hand, Elon Mask’s SpaceX program is progressing at a steady pace – the latest rocket either had a breakthrough and went to space, or had a breakdown and exploded once again. What does COVID-19 have to do with it?

Everything in the background. People were sick and tired with isolation to begin with, and were looking for a good excuse to end it, and they got one, and it is one of the worst ones ever, (no, we are not talking of the SpaceX rocket here). Therefore, now, the lockdown has effectively ended, (no really), and with a fiery explosion too. USA! USA! They are not even trying to blame the RF for this one, thank God. Maybe there is hope for the Americans yet. What next?

Well, today I wanted to talk about the hippos instead. Why? Well, why not? After elephants and rhinos, they are the biggest land mammals of the modern world…though that is a relative term, as I may’ve mentioned it: a hippo, an elephant, a rhino, and a human can all stand on the black of a blue whale, and the marine giant won’t even notice their combined weight, so there!..

…Whales, (or rather – the cetaceans), are mentioned here for a reason: the hippos are their closest relatives out of all the mammals, and share many traits with the cetaceans, including a dependency on the water to live; there are important differences too, but that brings us to taxonomy, actually.

As people do not talk very often, there are two species of hippos in the modern world – the common hippopotamus, (aka Hippopotamus amphibius), that everyone knows about, and the much more obscure pygmy hippopotamus, (aka Hexaprotodon liberiensis), which has a much smaller distribution than their larger cousin does, (the two mammals may share the biological order and family, but each belongs to its’ own genus), is much smaller than the common hippopotamus is, period, and is also – proportionally more terrestrial than the common hippopotamus is. Pause.

Let us start again. The common hippopotamus lives… in fresh water, yes, but it also comes aground, where it prefers open spaces. Of course, it is also big and heavy enough to muscle its way through most of riverside vegetation (and beyond), and combined with its’ grazing, the common hippopotamus can turn many an overgrown space into open space instead.

The pygmy hippopotamus is much shier and more retiring, and while it spends more time on land than it cousin does, the land in question is the African jungle, which is much more obscure, dark, damp and less assessable to humans than the African savannah is. As such, the pygmy hippopotamus’ effect on the landscape is much smaller too, and as a result, people became aware of it much later than of the common hippo, (and no, I’m not talking about just the Europeans and Americans, but about the other people too, such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, who became aware of the common hippo fairly early in the human history), and they began to interact, (hunt, capture, study, etc.), with this species much later than with the common hippo too. Such two superficially similar (closely related) mammals and two such different fates!..

…As for the Biblical Behemoth, which might have been inspired by the common hippo? The jury is still out on this one – it might be a hippo… or a rhino, an elephant, even an African buffalo, which we really should discuss one of those days, as we’ve discussed its’ cousins the bison, the yak and the zebu earlier.

Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #53 - May 13

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and on this particular day, there is nothing going on in real life that is exceptionally noteworthy, the rant of a certain musician on Twitter aside. People are falling apart, as simple as that, and the fact that such captains of industry as the aforementioned Twitter, Google and Facebook are allowing their workers to work from their homes even in the post-lockdown world doesn’t help. Working from home means co-existing with your family 24/7, and this is what the lockdown has already exposed as overrated – you need to have some space from your family, some time off, and if that isn’t happening, then it isn’t happening, and you got an unavoidable meltdown instead. What else?

…People have been asking me as to why I have not been discussing Ubisoft’s latest ‘Assassin’s Creed’ installment – the one with the Vikings. My answer is plain: I do not do ‘Assassin’s Creed’ as a rule, and this version is essentially ‘Assassin’s Creed’ meeting the ‘Vikings’ of History channel, and in case you have forgotten, I wasn’t impressed with that TV series either. Frankly, I’m going to call a spade a spade and call out, saying that if it wasn’t for the lockdown, the ‘ACV’ wouldn’t receive as much publicity as it did, but this is the hand it was dealt instead, the end.

…As for ‘Stargirl’, the latest darling of the DC TV-verse, I’m not going to touch it right now either – I’m not a big fan of DC TV-verse, ‘Stargirl’ may be superhero drama meeting a teenage rom-com, or sit-com, or whatever – don’t care. This is not my TV show for now, the end. What is left?

…I feel like talking about lions, actually. Of course, we have talked about them repeatedly in the past, so let us do this now once more – I am feeling sufficiently nostalgic, here and now.

So: the lion is the king of the beasts. People claimed that it could stare into the sun without blinking. However, so can the other cats – the anatomy of their eyes permits that. ‘Tis just that the lion is so regal-looking, so majestic! It appears that a lion is never looking at anyone directly, but only at some point in the distance, as if it does not notice you. And its’ roar is something else – it isn’t roar, it’s thunder!

When it comes to strength, the lion does not attack only the African bush elephant, (namely, the fully-grown animals), the African rhinos, (ditto), and the polar bear, (because the latter is never found in the African wilderness). Anything else is fair game. The lion’s strength is such, that it can break a bull’s back with one paw strike. However, more often, the lioness will jump onto the prey’s back, grab the muzzle with its paws, and by jerking around, it either suffocates the beast or breaks its’ neck, whether it was a wildebeest, some other antelope, a zebra, or even the African buffalo.

…Yes, there are several subspecies, or even species, of the African buffalo, which is only a distant relative of the American buffalo, aka the bison that we have discussed in the past. However, right now, we are talking about the lions, which is the only species in the Panthera genus that hunts in packs, as the wild dogs do – aka in prides. All the rest of the ‘roaring cats’ are solitary hunters. Beyond them, we got the cheetah and maybe the cheetah’s South American cousin the jaguarundi, which also live in family prides, especially the cheetah. Too little is known about the jaguarundi to make a concrete statement.

Finally, the lions used to live beyond Africa – in Eurasia and even in North America, (which used to be connected to Eurasia via a land bridge in the past epochs). As you know, those beasts were called cave lions in Europe and American lions in North America. Whether they actually lived in caves, or were only depicted there by the Stone Age humans, is another story. These days, lions live only in Africa, and in the Gir Forest in India, Asia, and their status slash well-being is contradictory and worrisome. A sad end for the king of the beasts there!..

…Well, this is it for now – see you all soon!

Quarantine entry #44 - May 4

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. No, I am not talking about the COVID-19 for the moment, but rather about the Asian giant hornets, better known as the Japanese killer hornets. A couple of inches long at least, and armed with a stinger and venom glands to match, this insect is more hated for killing honeybee colonies, especially outside of its’ native range in Asia, where the local honeybee populations have been known to swarm scouting specimens of this species and literally cook them to death, using their special powers. Pause.

Now, so far, (May 4, 2020), the giant hornets were spotted in the West, in the Washington state (and maybe the province of British Columbia). There were about one or two specimens of this giant insect, but given everything – they may devastate honeybee colonies, but their venomous stingers can kill humans and other creatures as well – everyone is panicking already, especially since with the COVID-19 still on the loose, humanity’s control over nature is more tenuous than how it usually is. What next?

Back in the East, in Brampton, Ontario, an American beaver got confused for an American alligator, or something similar among those lines. Considering that recently, (about May 3, 2020, or so), a woman in the U.S. state of South Caroline did die from an alligator attack, there is some reasoning beneath all the hysteria – I hope. The American beaver is one of the bigger rodents in the world and it is certainly the biggest in North America, and people have certainly died from beaver attacks, as a matter of fact – but proportionally, there are fewer beaver attacks, successful and otherwise, than there are alligator attacks, (and the fact that there are more horror movies featuring American alligators than beavers has a reason, you know?).

Pause. I will not tell a lie – today, I planned revisit our old friends the elephants. Why? Why not? It’s May the 4^th, people are talking about SW related jokes all over the Internet, and I’m feeling despondent – yes, the 2^nd season of ‘The Mandalorian’ is coming to Netflix, or Disney Plus, or some other streaming service… and judging by the trailer, Marvel’s GotG and the last two ‘Avengers’ movies left a mark on the SW series – baby Yoda is more of a teen now, and he acts rather like how the teen Groot acted in the aforementioned Marvel films. And-?

And nothing. The last SW movie ended on a low note for all sorts of reasons, (though the Rey/Kylo Ren ship lives on), including the fact that it was a damage control attempt that failed. So far, ‘The Mandalorian’ is the SW franchise’s last and only attempt to fix itself, and if it tries to do so by ripping-off the Marvel franchise… not cool.

…Yes, the ‘Trolls 2’ movie has also ripped off the last two ‘Avengers’ films, but they tried to be subtle-ish about it, plus this film did end on a rather different movie than the ‘Avengers: Endgame’ film did, so it kind of blew over and vanished in the COVID-19-related smog of obscurity. The fact that it was aimed at a younger audience than the ‘Avengers’ films did probably did not hurt either. ‘The Mandalorian’ does not have that.

What does it have? Plenty of distance, (especially metaphorically speaking) from the SW Sequel Trilogy, which was not good. It was not bad, but it certainly was not good either. The 1^st season of ‘The Mandalorian’ established that it was not connected to the Sequel Trilogy… or at least it did not appear to when the 1^st season was aired. Now that the movies are over for the moment, and we don’t have much information about the 2^nd season so far, the situation can always change – and as we’ve talked about above, the 2^nd season of ‘The Mandalorian’ may fail due to its’ own flaws and not be related to the Sequel Trilogy at all…

…Well, this is it for now. See you all soon! May the Fourth be with you indeed!

Quarantine entry #30 - April 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, which is a why Canadian from Nova Scotia, G.W., decided to do something about it, and started a shooting spree that killed around 16-17 people, as well as the man himself. Pause.

Listen, I am not the best person on this planet – just listen to me complain about DW (say, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte vs. George Washington’), or AFO, (i.e. ‘Elephant vs. Rhino’), or even about JFC, (the Majungasaurus episode, for example). Fair enough and I do not deny that I am probably slowly going insane, for better or for worse, (probably for worse). Regardless, this weekend’s events are horrifying for me, and-?

And nothing. There are still a lot of black holes in the entire investigation, but even before today, (Monday 20, 2020), the official sources agreed that this incident happened unexpectedly; the unlucky RCMP officer was summoned to investigate some shooting incident, and it all snowballed from there. Pause.

Here is the thing. I have seen the photos of the deceased RCMP officer, and they have a rather Dudley Do-Right feeling to me. Regardless, this might be me, plus the event happened in a rather obscure town on the province of Nova Scotia, which is a far call from my home city of Toronto, Ontario, so this is probably just my inner snob speaking out, and-

-And the RCMP officer and the rest did not deserve to die for no good reason, just because G.W. might have cracked from the lockdown/quarantine/(self)-isolation & etc. There is a hierarchy for this sort of thing, it is kept in proportion, and G.W. blew it all apart. Asshole. Real life does suck, and so he had a bright idea of making it worse for a lot more people than before. This is not right. I may be a misanthrope, but I cannot approve of it. What next?

Here is a bit of original fiction that I have created before I learned about this weekend’s shooting in Nova Scotia and had to talk about it instead. Yes, in part, this is because of the lockdown/quarantine/etc. people are also starved of news to talk about, especially not related to COVID-19 or the Donald, and I am not sure that that is a good thing. Rumors can be nasty things, once they get out of hand; certainly neither the families of the deceased nor the investigators of the case in question really need any sorts of rumors to make their lives even worse – real life sucks already, thanks to COVID-19 and all… Where were we?

Ah yes, the original fiction, here we go:

In the jungle, branches are breaking, trees are swaying. It is the rhinoceros, one of the biggest beasts of the modern world, passing through. It is ignoring thorns and spikes, bushes and stumps. 

Rhinoceros’ hide is thick, like true armour - arrows will break, spears bend. Only bullets can get through.

...As a result of that, the five modern rhinoceros species are varying from endangered to extinct in the wild. The horn size varies from species to species, but all of them are hunted for it, regardless of where they live, in Africa or Asia...

It is not surprising, then, that the rhinoceros is a suspicious animal, with an explosive temper!

End.

…Well, this is it for now. Did you like the piece? I hope that I will see you all soon! Comments and criticisms welcome!

Quarantine entry #19 - April 9

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Not only COVID-19 is still going on strongly, this morning we had a very nasty snowstorm. Fortuitously, we stayed inside, and now the storm is over, (it is the beginning of April, after all), and nature is coming back out – the birds are flying, singing, fighting over their nesting territories en masse, showing just how resilient life on Earth. The storm passed and is over; COVID-19 too will pass and be over and life will return to normal. …Well, relatively so, seeing how the politicians, businessmen, and who else have you, are trying to take advantage of the lockdown and all, are trying to take advantage of the lockdown, and it is all coming down like a great big mess; people are fleeing into the literal woods to escape both COVID-19 and everything else. What next?

Let us talk about the giraffe. Why the giraffe? Because it is unique. There is no other mammal on the modern planet like it. If the modern elephants represent the last scions of an ancient dynasty of herbivorous mammals that fell due to the competition with the artiodactyl mammals, then the modern giraffe is one of those evolutionary cousins of the main dynasty – aka the antelopes, gazelles, wild cattle, sheep and goats – that had its’ heyday in the past, (the Miocene & the Pliocene epochs), but is largely gone, these days.

Pause. The entire taxonomic-biological family of the giraffe consists of the giraffe, and the okapi, aka the forest giraffe. Frankly, the latter name is not used very often, because the okapi is only like the giraffe in the most generic ways; you can see the family similarity, but nothing more. With an effort, you can confuse an Asian elephant with an African one, or an Asian rhinoceros with an African one, but an okapi with a giraffe? Just no. …The families of the okapi and the giraffe have diverged during the Miocene slash the Pliocene, around 11.5 MYA, and the two have never been in contact since.

The okapi family is represented by a single species – the okapi itself. The giraffe, on the other hand, is murkier, as people in charge of biological classification still have not made their mind as to if there is just a single giraffe species, or four of them, or what. Even if there is just a single giraffe species, it may have up to nine subspecies, which is a lot. …Of course, with humans hunting them for all sorts of reasons, or even without any reasons at all, because we humans can be assholes, they may not be around for much longer, but that is not a good thing.

…Yes, COVID-19 has hit humans, even in Africa, hard, so they may not be up for the giraffes, but no one knows exactly how it affects other animals; for example, a tiger in Bronx zoo was discovered to have it; and with giraffes slash okapis, it is anyone’s guess.

So, why is the giraffe so unique? Because it is a very specialized animal – it is not big: it is tall. A good portion of the giraffe is its’ disproportionally long neck and legs; the neck, I think, amounts for about half of the giraffe’s body length, (while in case of the okapi it is about 30%, on average). Just like a human’s, the okapi’s and the giraffe’s neck consist of only 7 vertebra, but the giraffe’s are the most massive one out of the three by far, both in size and in weight. Isn’t trivia fun?

What next? …Um, aside from the humans, the main enemies of the giraffe are the African lion and the Nile crocodile; no one else really wants to tackle and fully-grown giraffe – compared to an elephant or a rhinoceros they may look like great big fragile land kites or something, but their head-butts are painful, and their kicks can be deadly. African lions, however, are known to tackle African bush elephants, (not fully grown, but not just calves either), who are even stronger than the giraffes are, and so they do overpower giraffes by working as a team, on occasion.

The Nile crocodile, on the other hand, is more of a case by case situation – it is a solitary hunter; crocodiles of these species may gather together to feed, (their anatomy of jaws and teeth makes it easier for them to feed together, rather than separately, on something bigger than what they can just swallow whole)… where were we?

Ah yes, unlike the African lion, the Nile crocodile is a solitary hunter, but a social feeder, especially if the prey is big – say, a dead African hippo. Then the not-quite-social crocodiles gather and tolerate each other, more or less, as they feed – with ‘tolerate’ being the key word here. The African lions hunt together, (though there is plenty of case-by-case variation there), and their society is quite complex, (cough, TLK is full of baloney, cough), but they and the Nile crocodiles do not have anything in common aside from both of them living in Africa.

…Yes, we have discussed the ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’ AFO episode a while back, and spoiler alert – the lion lost, (and the giraffe was not involved at all), which is fair: a male African lion is a fighter, but it is a team fighter, and on its own, it rather has a disadvantage against the crocodile. Plus, on that episode team AFO really did its’ homework, and their deduction that the Nile crocodile was a better fighter than the African lion was justified, so there!

Back to the giraffe? Er, did it leave while we were dealing with the lion and the crocodile? Why, we have not even mentioned the non-avian theropod dinosaurs, aka the meat-eaters, are the goal of a real discussion of whether they did hunt together as the African lions do, or just fed together, as the Nile crocodiles? And what did they feed upon? Sauropods, among other things, just look at the second episode of WWD, or the fifth episode of ‘Planet Dinosaur’ (2013), for example! Are sauropods like the giraffe?

No, not exactly. Some are – that is the Brachiosaurus and its’ relatives. Others are not – rather, they are big, (aka the elephant) – that is Argentinosaurus and the rest of the titanosaurs; or they are just long – aka Diplodocus and its’ relatives, (including the Apatasaurus). Yes, we are generalizing here so hard, but the thing is that many of the sauropods were built different from the giraffe, and many of them were not built like it.

Moreover, neither was the extinct Indricotherium, or whatever it is named now, (see the third episode of ‘Walking with Beasts’). Just like the extinct titanosaurs, or the existing elephants, it was big rather than tall, and quite proportionate. Why did it die out? Because not unlike the giraffe it was a specialized mammal, designed to eating foliage, and as the savannas, prairies, steppes, etc. spread, the Indricotherium could no longer survive. With the modern giraffe – it is pretty much the same thing: the giraffe survives alongside all of those antelopes and gazelles by being the best foliage eater in the African grasslands – a very specialized niche, to be sure, but it does allow the giraffe to survive over more of Africa as opposed to the more generalized okapi, which exists only in parts of the African rainforest, and whose overall population is worse off than that of the giraffe. Evolution and ecology sometimes play strange tricks upon animals!..

…Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!

Quarantine entry #17 - April 7

Obligatory disclaimer: as you all know, real life sucks, so where were we? Ah yes, yesterday, we have talked small – dragonflies. Today, let us talk big – elephants.

There are three species of elephants that exist in the modern world: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. In fact, we have talked about the African bush elephant way back when, when we discussed the AFO episode where this grey giant went against a white rhinoceros and won. Quite justifiably too, for elephants kill and dominate rhinos more often than it happens in reverse – but it does happen, so the elephant did work hard and took risks to take down the rhino. Next?

Again, the elephant featured in AFO was the African bush elephant; it is the biggest land mammal of the modern times as well as the biggest elephant species out of the three. The Asian elephant is in the middle, and the African forest elephant is the smallest. True to its’ name, this elephant is found only in the tropical forests of western and central Africa and is quite smaller than the African bush elephant is, and its’ ears are also more rounded in shape out of the two species. …In addition, the African bush elephant is found in a much wider range of habitats, and there is a well-justified theory that the two African elephant species are not all that closely related to each other, which may cause their taxonomic classification to be re-worked.

…The Asian elephant isn’t closely related to the African species to begin with, and if anyone cares as to how it is different from the latter, then the Asian elephant has smaller ears, smaller tusks, (its’ females are tuskless, and the males often are as well), and its’ trunk has only one ‘finger’ at the end, while the African elephants have too. In fact, the elephants that people usually see in circuses and zoos are usually the Asian species – they deal better with humans and captivity.

What next?

A mention of another TV show ‘Inside Nature’s Giants’, where a deceased elephant was investigated, and it was ‘discovered’ that as far as herbivores go, modern elephants are less efficient than, say, the modern giraffes are at digesting their food – plant matter. This is not surprising, since taxonomically speaking, elephants are not ‘true’ ungulates, but rather ‘near ungulates’, herbivorous mammals that aren’t hooved. Whether or not elephants have hooves or nails is another story, but their closest relatives are hyraxes, (small mammals that look more like hamsters or guinea pigs), and sea cows, (aka dugongs and manatees). It is a motley crew, and now that scientists put this trio into the Afrotheria group, which also contains African insectivores – golden moles, otter shrews, Madagascar tenrecs and the aardvark, it has become only motlier. Sometimes, scientific reasoning is really hard to understand.

…And now, some apologies. Firstly, when we were discussing camels, I forgot to mention that Old World camels can hybridize with each other; the result is a better version of the dromedary camel. The Muslims used it as a war beast when horses could not be used. There is also a llama/camel hybrid, but it is sterile, resembles a variant llama, and is not very popular with modern breeders these days; there certainly are not a lot of mentions about this ‘cama’ beast at all!

Secondly, when we were discussing dragonflies, I forgot to mention that while their eyes literally wrap around the dragonfly’s head, the damselflies’ eyes remain separate from each other. Informative, is not it?.. Anything else?

Sadly, no. There is a lot you can say about elephants, but none of it is too overwhelmingly exciting; the 3 modern species are the last remnants of once a great dynasty that practically closed with the last Ice Age, and humans have done their best to decrease the elephant numbers even more. Pity. Elephants are wonderful animals and they deserve our protection. Instead, humans have tried to make them into bioweapons, as the DW episode ‘Hannibal vs. Genghis Khan’ showed – team Hannibal used a live ‘war elephant’ on that S3 episode… but we’ve talked about in the past. …But as for the modern elephant circumstances, maybe with COVID-19 around, their chances will improve.

…Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!

AFO - Elephant vs. Rhinoceros

And now that most of the non-AoS Marvel™-related events are behind us at the moment, let us go back to AFO. True, we have gone over most of them through the years, but we have saved the best for last, really. Let us talk about the ‘Elephant vs. Rhinoceros’ episode.

What sets it apart? Firstly, the quality of CGI. It was always very good in the AFO episodes (for its time), but somehow in ‘Elephant vs. Rhinoceros’, the CGI was especially well done. Good!

Secondly, (technical aspects are important, but for us, they are not that important) is the fact that both combatants in this episode were herbivores and unlike some other episodes, (such as the ‘Jaguar vs. anaconda’), this scenario – an elephant fighting a rhino – is rooted in real life.

Now let us be rational – the ‘Elephant vs. Rhinoceros’ episode is atypical, but it is not unique; AFO did feature two other unusual contestants: the walrus in the ‘Polar Bear vs. Walrus’ episode and the hippopotamus in the ‘Hippopotamus vs. Bull Shark’ episode, and both times the oddballs won. Why?

…Because as it had been discussed in the past, carnivores tend to be built along similar lines; a bear, (either brown or polar, it does not matter) is only distantly related to a tiger, but their skeletal structures are similar. The stoat (ermine, long-tailed weasel, etc.), the bear and the sea lion are related, but they live different lifestyles, and yet their skulls are similar, because they evolved towards the same goal: to feed on other animals. There are plenty of differences – the sea lion specializes in slippery fish, the bear is more of an omnivore, etc. – but the similarities are present as well – and this brings us to the elephant and the rhinoceros.

…Actually, no. This brings us to all of the ‘pachyderms’ – the elephant, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. When they were first discovered by the Europeans, the latter had never seen anything like that in Europe, and so, when they began to scientifically classify them, (as opposed to, say, kill them in gladiatorial battles), they put them together as ‘the pachyderms’, the ‘thick-skinned animals’. At the modern times, this term is not so much incorrect, as it is outdated – the ‘pachyderms’ aren’t really related to each other at all, they are much more distant from each other than a tiger and a bear are, comparatively speaking – the rhinoceros is a perissodactyl, an odd-toed hoofed mammal, a cousin to the horse, zebra, wild donkey (and the tapir, which looks kind of like a caricature elephant, and is something of a pachyderm by itself), the hippopotamus is an artiodactyl, an even-toed hoofed mammal, but a peculiar one – it is the most reminiscent of the shared ancestor of both even-toed hoofed mammals and the cetaceans, and the elephant is a proboscidean, a paenungulate, whose closest relatives are the sea cows, the dugong and the manatees, (which physically resembles whales and dolphins instead), and the hyrax, a strange little mammal that looks more like a rodent, (and is the size of one). I.e., the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the elephant are the results of three different lineages that led to the same goal: a large, even mega-large, herbivore that towers over the competition…literally. The hippopotamus went sideways by becoming ‘the water horse’, a semi-aquatic animal that lives mostly at the river’s edge, getting the best of the both worlds…while its’ only living cousin, the pygmy hippopotamus, is a much smaller animal that is active mostly at night, and while the two species do share the biological family, they aren’t very close relatives either.

The rhinoceros’ situation is similar – the five surviving rhinoceros species belong to four different families, (though the Sumatran rhinoceros might have died out by now, sad), and…

And they behave differently, the African species are much more terrestrial than the Asian ones are, because there are no hippopotamus species in Asia, and its’ niche there is vacant.

…Okay, there is the Malaysian tapir species, but it is not a widespread species, (though neither are the Sumatran and the Javan rhinoceroses), so it doesn’t come into conflict with its’ rhinoceros cousins, so let’s put it aside. Basically, all of the ‘pachyderms’ tend to lean towards an aquatic lifestyle, both the prehistoric elephants and rhinoceroses have hippopotamus-like species in their family tree; the modern African elephants (two species) and rhinoceroses (also two species) are the most terrestrial of them all, and the ones that had evolved in more extreme conditions, food-wise: there is proportionally less food in the African savanna than it is in the Asian jungle.

…Yes, one of the African elephant species lives in the African jungle, and it is smaller than its’ bush cousin is – and that was the elephant featured on AFO. The rhinoceros featured there was also the biggest modern rhinoceros – the white rhinoceros, as opposed to the black rhinoceros, which lives not in the savanna, but in scrubland, and feeds on leaves, rather than grasses. It is slightly smaller than the white rhinoceros is, but is about 45% lighter instead, and that is important, because in the elephant-rhinoceros-hippopotamus world, size, weight and strength are intertwined: the bigger an animal is, the heavier and stronger it is; the fights of the ‘pachyderms’ have no finesse, just massive damage inflicted on the combatants…literally and directly. The elephant, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus represent three different linages occupying the same niche, and so they function along the same lines, with some different details. The hippopotamus is aquatic, while the elephant towers over its competition, proportionally, it is more gracile than the rhinoceros or the hippopotamus are. And?

And the elephant is proportionally stronger than either the rhinoceros or the hippopotamus are. In a world where brute strength is one of the key factors, this makes the elephant the top herbivore in Africa (and Asia), and as such, it dominates its’ nearest rivals, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus by a wide margin, and thus its’ victory on AFO was justified.

…That is it for this installment, see you all next time!