Jaws vs. Livyatan 2024 - Sep 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us briefly talk about the ‘Jaws vs. Leviathan’ that was aired during the summer 2024. It is a sequel to the ‘Jaws vs. Meg’ that also aired earlier, and was discussed by us as well. Therefore, what about this show?

On one hand, it is an improvement over the first show, if simply by virtue of having a better CGI, one that is not almost all-monotonous dark blue. There are different shades and colors, and one can easily notice what is going on here. Moreover, the plot/script of the final face-off is a bit better, and is less reminiscent of the dragon-not-quite-a-fight in the HoD S1 finale. Therefore, why is the rant?

Because the premise of the show just feels somewhat wrong. Sharks are cartilaginous fish, while whales are cetacean mammals, alongside the smaller dolphins, porpoises, and co. The physical similarities between the two groups (and the extinct ichthyosaurus reptiles of the Mesozoic) are only superficial and physical, and are not even complete, given how the cetaceans (and the extinct ichthyosaurs) breathe air, while the sharks (and their relatives) do not.

Yet, the differences between sharks and cetaceans is more than just physical, it is mental: like most of the mammals, the cetaceans take care of their young, (as it was shown in the show), while the sharks – not so much. The cooperative hunting/feeding by the great white sharks is something else again: it is a pecking order, and a cooperative pecking order, but it is not pack hunting of the orcas.

Orcas… they’re the top pack hunters in the modern oceans; great white sharks attack and eat whale calves, to be sure, but orcas attack and successfully eat adult whales instead, including such big species as the modern grey whale, and even, according to some rumors, sperm whales.

Now, male sperm whales are the biggest modern toothed whales (cetaceans), period, and not even orcas like to mess with them, but sperm whale females and calves are smaller and thus have bigger chances to end up on the orcas’ menu. That said, what matters here is that the orcas do what the great whites can do, only better, and their existence is one of the reasons as to why the Megalodon shark did die out by the Pleistocene epoch. (Recent past, but still the past). In addition, the modern sperm whale?

First, the modern sperm whale is a carnivore specialist, as it feeds primarily on large species of squid and octopus, while the modern orca will try to eat anything at least once. Second, the two species are not close relatives; the sperm whale’s close relatives are the Kogia whales, two species of really small cetaceans that look slightly like the sperm whale does, but without the oversized head; there are plenty of debate as to how close they are to the sperm whale… but they are still more closely related to it than the killer whale does; more specifically, the sperm whale, the Kogia whales, and the extinct Livyatan whale are one group, and the killer whale is another, in the overall cetacean clan; and to involve the orca with the sperm whales and their relatives is wrong and incorrect.

Yet genealogy does not really play a role in the ‘Jaws vs. Livyatan’ special, and it doesn’t matter; what matters is that comparing sharks to cetaceans is like comparing apples to oranges… or even potatoes – the two groups of animals are too different on the inside to compare and contrast; but-

-but frankly, the ‘Jaws vs.’ series doesn’t care about such scientific niceties; instead, in the best tradition of AFO, it does its’ best to come across as both informative and entertaining; the version I watched was rather skewed in favor of the sharks – but then again, these are Shark Week specials after all – but still informative and entertaining enough for me to watch till the end, even though the repetitive reiteration that the CGI sharks act just as the live fish do was annoying. Still, the show was better than the reality is, because real life flat-out sucks – but that is another story.

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

Jaws vs. Meg 2023 - June 18

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us have a flashback to the Shark Week 2023 instead. Now, there has been some consideration about the new SW: Acolyte series, but at the end of the day? It does not deserve the hate that it is getting… or does it?

From my point of view, the people who hate ‘Acolyte’ are the same people who hated the SW Sequel Trilogy, aka films 7-9, and who were handled by Disney/SW… however they were handled. Regardless, they weren’t vanquished; already by the time of the ‘Mandalorian’ S3, when Disney/SW were beginning to bring, well, the SW universe from the 6^th movie’s setting to the 7^th, the old criticisms were coming back. They stopped when the ‘Mandalorian’ ended, but apparently did not go away, as they resurfaced once more when the ‘Acolyte’ came out. Now what?

So far, Disney/SW franchise is not backing down from the TV show the same way they did with the 8^th and 9^th films. Back then, they fluctuated between total support and full reboot, and the result was a big setback, much bigger than any other Disney branches had to deal with. Since then, Disney/SW tried to retcon and circumvent its’ rebooted/redesigned universe, but with more mixed success than they would like, and ‘Acolyte’ is part of this mixed bag. What will Disney/SW do next, now that the ‘Acolyte’ is not being as successful/accepted as they expected it to be? It is anyone’s guess, of course, but hopefully they will be more consistent with their response than how they acted during the SW Sequel movie trilogy… Back into the real world?

No, ‘cause the reason I’m writing this entry is because I got to see the Shark Week special ‘Jaws vs. Meg’. In this special feature, people made a CGI battle between the great white shark and the Megalodon, with the latter winning, because of course it did. Pause.

Here is the thing. The reason as to why I was watching the special in the first place was because of nostalgia for AFO (Animal Face-off), as well as JFC (Jurassic Fight Club) and DW (Deadliest Warrior). In the first show, episodes ended with two RL CGI animals faced-off, in the second – we had prehistoric animals, and in the third, we had a live-action re-enactment of a quasi-historical battle – say, a Spartan vs. a ninja, or a Viking vs. a samurai. Here, in ‘Jaws vs. Meg’, we also have a CGI battle, both of a modern and of a prehistoric animals, well – fish. What next?

Well, for one thing, there was no doubt that this was the fight for the great white shark to lose. In nature, especially among the vertebrates, (the invertebrates are another story, admittedly – just watch Monster Bug Wars), size matters, and bigger and stronger beings triumph over their physical inferiors. Lions dominate over leopards, leopards – over cheetahs, wolves – over coyotes, coyotes – over foxes, and so on. The bigger and stronger Megalodon would dominate the great white shark during the time the two species coexisted, simply because while the great white shark could hurt it, the Megalodon could kill it far too easier than vice versa – as the special feature’s CGI confirmed. The Megalodon was able to take the punishment that the great white shark threw at it, and kill the latter with a single lucky strike. Overdramatized, maybe, but regardless, this would how it happen… what else?

Co-existing with the Megalodon caused the great white shark to become a specialist – it specializes it hunting seals, fur seals and sea lions, mostly in tropical and subtropical waters. It is more modernized than the Megalodon was, but it still prefers warm and tropical waters than temperate and colder ones. These days, with the global warming (or whatever it is called), the shark is moving north (and south?), including the shores of Eastern U.S. and Canada. What will come out of this, is yet unknown.

Back in the past, the great white shark had to stay closer to the shoreline, because in the open ocean the adult Megalodon lived and dominated – other sharks. However, there were also the cetaceans…

The cetaceans’ overall evolutionary history still hasn’t been completely resolved, but what matters here and now, is that during the Miocene and Pliocene, the baleen whales were smaller than their modern counterparts are, and more vulnerable to attack from such as carnivores as the Megalodon and the predatory prehistoric sperm whale cousins, (including the Livyatan). Just as the great white shark specialized in the pinnipeds – seals and their cousins that usually stay closer to the coast than in the open seas, so did the Megalodon specialize in the cetaceans, which preferred the open seas to the coastlines instead. The two species co-existed by specializing in different directions, and the Megalodon’s closer cousins, the mako sharks, specialized in yet a third – they aren’t as massive as the great white shark, but are faster and more maneuverable than it is. If the great white shark is a lion of the seas, then the mako sharks are the cheetahs instead. They would not outfight the Megalodon (or most other prehistoric predators), but outpace and outmaneuver them instead. The killer whales, for example, are known to attack great white sharks – successfully, too – but the mako sharks? Not so much. However, where do they fit in?

The main reason as to why the Megalodon is not around anymore, no matter what fan favorite theories proclaim. During the end of the Miocene and the first half of the Pliocene, the two Americas formed a single continent finally, and the world began to enter an Ice Age. The Megalodon (and many of its’ prey species) couldn’t handle the climate change and died out; also, in the Megalodon’s case, the disappearance of the warm shallow seas between the two American continents left its’ young vulnerable – well, more vulnerable, to predation from smaller sharks, including the great white and the hammerhead species. Megalodon vanished during the Pliocene and Pleistocene periods, and the smaller sharks flourished.

The same situation goes for the whales: the modern whales are giants, true, but they are specialists as well. The baleen whales feed on plankton, and many of their species spend their lives migrating between the two poles, following the seasons and the currents, to keep themselves fed, (and the global warming is throwing a wrench into this), while the biggest toothed whale, the sperm whale, is a deep sea hunter, feeding mostly on the big, giant, and colossal deep sea squid species. Its’ closest relatives, the two Kogia whales, are tiny by comparison, and little is known about them, so let us put them aside for the moment. The point here is that the time of easy living in the ocean has ended for now even before the humans evolved on planet Earth; compared to the Miocene, when the global oceans were full of small and medium-sized baleen whales, the modern ocean has only big baleen whales, or giant ones. Megalodon would be outmuscled in the modern ocean – but the great white shark would have nothing to do with that… Anything else?

The CGI battle of ‘Jaws vs. Meg’ could have used some tweaking and twerking, but this is splitting hairs; the point here is that it was an enjoyable TV program, while the ‘Acolyte’, for example, is much more forgettable.

Therefore, we will end the discussion for now - This is it. 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 #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!

Cats & whales - Sep 7

…Recently, on YouTube, I came across a video discussion about ‘big cats’ vs. ‘little cats’, and how those terms are confusing. Here are my two cents about them.

Firstly, these terms are not scientific, but more of lay. In reality, you can describe all animals, including wild cat species, as either ‘big’ or ‘little’, but from taxonomy’s point of view, most of the big cats belong to the genus Panthera, or – the roaring cats, (because they can roar). Currently, this genus consists of the lion, the tiger, the leopard, the jaguar, and – the snow leopard, (or ounce). The clouded leopard, (well, leopards – there are two species of them), belongs to the sister group of the Panthera cats, Neofelis, and together, the two genera compose the Pantherinae subfamily of the cat family.

So far so good, it can also be added that the ounce, while it is more often called the snow leopard, is much more closely related to the tiger, while the scientists are not currently sure, just who is more closely related to the lion – the jaguar or the leopard. The tiger and the ounce are the closest relatives of each other among the roaring cats though, even though the ounce really does look more like a leopard, which is why it is much more commonly called the snow leopard. What next?

The other ‘big cats’ of the modern world are usually the cheetah and the puma, (also cougar, mountain lion, catamount, panther, etc.). They are a part of the Felinae family, aka the non-roaring cats, which contains all of the cats that do not belong to the Panthera and Neofelis genera. Usually, the scientists call the cheetah and the puma ‘the Puma lineage’, which consists of the cheetah, the puma, and the jaguarundi, which looks nothing like a jaguar. Really, this small-headed, short-legged, long-bodied wildcat looks more like a weasel of some sort, not a cat. It lives in Central and South America, eating various small animals – rodents, birds, small reptiles, arthropods. They even eat some plants too. It is much smaller than the cheetah and the puma are, but then again, the cheetah is not really big, it is merely tall, as is the giraffe. I.e., the giraffe is tall, the elephant is big, (look at the two side by side to see the difference), the cheetah is also tall, while the lion is also big. This is different.

The cougar, (or the puma), on the other hand, is genuinely large, about the same size as the leopard, (or the smaller jaguars) is, and is built like a leopard too. As such, it is truly is a big cat size-wise, but on the other hand? It cannot roar. The jaguar can, and so can the leopard, but both the cheetah and the puma cannot, just as their cousin the jaguarundi cannot. As such, they are ‘little cats’, even though there is nothing little about them, particularly the puma, but from taxonomic point of view, they are. Period.

Hence lies the root of confusion between ‘big’ and ‘little’ cats: the scientific and non-scientific terms do not fully match. The wild cats are not unique with this problem; other animals have it too – the whales, for example.

Just like ‘big’ and ‘little cats’, ‘whale’ isn’t exactly a scientific term; science divides the cetaceans into two parvorders: the Mysticeti, or the baleen whales, and the Odontoceti, or the toothed whales. …There’s also the Archaeoceti, but all of those mammals have died out, (or not, and instead they are the truth behind the sea serpent myth as some cryptozoologists exclaim, but until a genuine sea serpent is captured and studied, they are still considered mythical, and the Archaeoceti – extinct).

Anyhow, most of the cetaceans known as ‘whales’ belong to the Mysticeti, the baleen whales; the Odontoceti or the toothed whales have proportionally far fewer ‘whales’ among their number, as opposed to ‘dolphins’, ‘porpoises’ or ‘blackfish’, and only the biggest of them all – the sperm whale – is usually treated as a ‘proper’ whale in non-scientific terms. Everyone else is usually considered ‘something else’; that is especially ironic since the sperm whale’s closest official relatives, the so-called dwarf sperm whale and the pygmy sperm whale, are among the smallest members of the cetacean clade. Sadly, they are also among the most obscure, shy, retiring and least studied members of the clade too, so we’ll talk about them some other time instead…

…And that is that for this talk; see you all soon!

AFO: Sperm whale vs. giant squid - July 20

The final episode of AFO, (but no, this is not the final time that I will talk about this series and shows that are similar to it), was something special indeed – ‘sperm whale vs. giant squid’! Wow!

Indeed, and for several reasons. Not unlike the ‘polar bear vs. walrus’ or ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’, the ‘sperm whale vs. giant squid’ episode was based on real life footage – as much as possible, for, unlike the African savanna or even the Arctic, the ocean depths still aren’t readily assessable to the humanity – and that is where the sperm whale and the giant squid dwell.

Next? The giant squid, (and its’ cousin, the colossal squid, of which even less is known than about the giant squid proper), is a squid, of course, meaning that it is a mollusk, a close relative to the smaller species of squid, octopi and cuttlefishes, and a distant relative of the snail, the mussel, the oyster and the nudibranch. The sperm whale, meanwhile, is a toothed whale, meaning that it is, technically, a dolphin, and its’ closest relatives are the so-called pygmy sperm whale and dwarf sperm whale, each being a fraction of the sperm whale’s size. They are shy, timid, retiring creatures who don’t behave anything as the sperm whale does, and some scientists, who specialize in classification of animals, wonder if the three species of sperm whales are actually related to each other or not. But for now, they are classified together, period.

What of the actual face-off? People who traveled the seas saw the sperm whale fight the giant squid irregularly, but they did see it. Plus, many sperm whales, especially the bulls, show the scars caused and created by the beaks and sucker-claws of squids, (though not just the giant ones), so the battles between the two orders of animals happen on a regular basis – the humans just usually aren’t there to see them.

And when they do, it is one of the biggest, not just the rarest, spectacles on Earth – the Biblical Leviathan battles the Kraken of the pagan Norse myths! Ladies and gentlemen, make your bets!

(Note: Jormungandr the World Serpent, while also a Norse monster, is not the Kraken. The two are separate entities, and when ‘Clash of the Gods’ TV series tried to rationalize Jormungandr as the Kraken/giant squid alongside Scylla of the Greek myths, it didn’t work. However, there are reasons why ‘Clash’ failed and did not go beyond a single season, and this is one of them.)

Where does this leave AFO? Well, they know that the sperm whales usually win this fight, so they adjust their CGI face-off accordingly. Their approach was to technically define and experiment with the physical properties of the two combatants, and this was what they did in their last episode. Since the sperm whale and the giant squid have nothing in common, the result was an epic (in scale) examination of the two combatants, because you cannot really compare the sperm whale to the giant squid: the two have nothing in common, not even convergent evolution! As such, AFO’s approach to their combatants transformed from a comparison into a study, two separate studies of the duo, with the show’s scientists studying and figuring out how each element of either combatants would fit into the face-off. AFO had plenty of authenticity and realism in it, and the last episode had showed it to the max. The major aspects of the sperm whale and the giant squid were shown in the most professional light possible…

Yet AFO got cancelled. Well, that is life. JFC, too, lasted for only 12 episodes and 1 season. The aforementioned ‘Clash’ – for just 10 episodes. ‘Beast Legends’, which also featured the Kraken as one of its monsters – 6. AFO didn’t do so poorly in the long run, when you think about; ‘Beast Legends’ wasn’t exactly a bad show in itself, but it was still worse than ‘MonsterQuest’, and RM is a better show still, (though lately it may be preparing to jump a different shark)… yet this is another story that we will talk about at another time.

As for the sperm whale and the giant squid in the real world? They are still around, though the human-based pollution of the environment, as well as of the global oceans and seas in particular, is slowly killing them off; the sperm whales have to deal with the issue of whaling too – nowadays it is less intense than how it was in the centuries past, but it is still there, and still a problem. People are trying to resolve it, (as well as the pollution issue), but with mixed success. I, for one, hope that in the future, they will succeed, before all that is left of the sperm whale and giant squid are live footage and CGI.