Quarantine entry #82 - June 11

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and I cannot even escape into AoS, because I am currently trapped where it is not available, (because there is no TV and all). Pause.

Well, because I do not want to tackle reality just yet, I will acknowledge that for the moment the final season of AoS is still staying in the AC time period – aka the post-WWII USA and they have already encountered their very first racist – a certain Mr. Sharpe. Right now, the character is mostly a comic relief, (this is the first time he has appeared in MCU period, and given AoS’ record of accomplishment, and it is possible that he will soon die anyhow… where were we?)

Ah yes, the racist. AC itself fiddled with the issue of racism in the USA post-WWII, especially in the second season, when agent – now chief – David Sousa suddenly had a non-captain Rogers’ rival for agent Carter’s heart of an Afro-American descent, cough – but now…

Well, now it seems that the final season of AoS is stealing plot ideas from the third season of AC that never was, which is good. Marvel’s ‘InHumans’ actually did manifest despite AoS’ present, and the result was insipid, and also cancelled after a single season, even though despite its’ flaws, it had a better, more compact plot than AoS usually had. Disney rocks?

Getting back to the issue of racism in the States, in particular – now, listen: the George Floyd situation manifested because of management and mismanagement of the protests, the Americans wanted a diversion from COVID-19, and so they got it! Now, people are talking about reforming the police, (a major federal organization, putting it mildly), Confederate statues are being pulled down, (seriously, what the Hell?!), and COVID-19 was put on a backburner, though now it is coming back – either because the George Floyd narrative has ran its’ course, the man has been buried, and, hopefully, at least some people on the top of the American society have begun to think as to what COVID-19 will do to American population now that the self-isolation was effectively torn down.

…As we have said before, in Canada the situation is different, less intense, and more artificial-feeling. It is possible that Trudeau is using it as a smoke screen… period, because he isn’t handling the COVID-19 chaos very well, but then again, right now, Canada is supposedly run by a Liberal/Conservative/NDP joint effort, and where are the other two? Scheer keeps on fighting with Trudeau, the end, and Singh, (for whom and whose NDP party I have voted, FYI), is simply a no-show. The Hell? Trudeau is flawed, (though he is better than the American Donald is by default), but at least he is trying to do something, which is more than you can say about the other two. Sigh. Canada may be better than the U.S. is, but these days? That is not much to go on about.

Now, today I actually wanted to talk about bears, but somehow I was never able to get into the right frame of mind. Pity, because actually bears are quite fascinating mammals, hailing from the Eocene epoch, aka practically the very beginning of the Cenozoic. Their various species and genera came and went, but in the modern times? There are only eight species in three genera, including the giant panda that we have discussed earlier. It is the most ancient of the modern bears, and one of the most specialized, and probably one of the smallest ones too, (I am sorry, but compared to a brown bear? The giant panda is not that huge).

At the other end of the spectrum we have the polar bear, the most recent of the modern bears, that we have already discussed on this blog, for it was featured on AFO, where it’d lost to a walrus, as well as its’ closest cousins – the brown bear, (defeated a Siberian tiger), and the American black bear, (who took down the American Alligator). This leaves with the spectacled bear, the sloth bear, and the sun and the moon bears.

The moon bear is the Asian black bear, which is an ecological counterpart to the American black bear, and whom we have discussed in the past, largely because of the conjunction to the American black bear, (the American alligator and the Chinese alligator were featured as well).

The sun bear is also called the Malaysian bear, and it is one of the smallest bears, possibly smaller than even the giant panda is – and is one of the most arboreal of all the modern bears. Unlike the moon bear, its’ patch on the chest is yellow rather than white, hence the ‘sun bear’ moniker.

…Conversely, the sloth bear, (aka the true bear from the ‘Jungle Book’) usually has no patch on its’ chest, but when it does, it is white. The same goes for the American black bear, actually – usually, this bear is colored in a single color, but sometimes it does have a white patch on its’ chest instead, (though it ought to be noted that an American black bear can be of any color actually, not just black, but also cinnamon brown or creamy white).

…The spectacled bear usually doesn’t have a mark on its’ chest – instead, it has ‘spectacles’ on its’ face, and it is the only modern survivor of the short-faced bear lineage, (remember, it was featured on the ‘Prehistoric Predators’ series?). That said, those ‘spectacles’ can look very different from one spectacled bear to another, and some can reach the chest area, I suppose. In fact, physically speaking, all bears look like each other, and aside from the brown and polar bears, (which are each other’s closest relatives out of all the modern bears), and the giant panda too, I suppose, all of the modern bears are colored similarly too – in black, with lighter patches of fur on its’ back. Even the giant panda’s black-and-white checkered coat might have evolved from a similar design as well; what do you think?

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

Quarantine entry #66 - May 26

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, though it is weird sometimes – for example, there is a granny of a singer, who is both over 90, and owns over a dozen of mature and fully-grown lions and tigers, (though not bears, apparently – somehow, she had missed them). The good singer is actually half-boasting about that – I am guessing she is waiting for the mammals to eat the granny and then be acquitted, because they are, well, animals, and are not really subjected to the American law…and if they are euthanized or whatever when the granny gets eaten, it’s no skin off the singer’s nose either – win-win. What next?

The province of Ontario – during the long weekend – broke all of the rules of social distancing, yet they still want the borders with U.S. closed. Imbeciles. This is why I hate other people too, and not just myself. Ergo, let us talk about the other animals instead – and how about the walrus?

…Yes, we’ve talked about the walrus a long time ago, when we’ve discussed the AFO episode ‘Polar bear vs. Walrus’ – remember it?.. but first, here is a shout-out to NatGeo’s latest mini TV-series, ‘Barkskins’, which we’ve mentioned earlier as well. This is a fairly decent and enjoyable drama, and a pleasant change from ‘The Wrong Missy’ and ‘The Lovebirds’ that we’ve discussed earlier.

As for the walrus itself…where to start? The walrus is the biggest pinniped of the Northern Hemisphere – males can reach up to 4 m in length and weigh up to 2 metric tons. Despite its physical similarity with the eared seals, (aka fur seals & sea lions) rather than the true seals, the walrus is in its own group, not exactly too close to either of the seal groups, and it is a single species, with two or three subspecies, (scientists are not sure about the number).

The walruses prefer to live in the shallows of the northern seas, where they feed on bottom-dwelling sea animals – molluscs, worms, crustaceans, etc. There are stories about walrus orphans that became full carnivores, but that evidence is anecdotal, and in the last few decades there wasn’t any new ones, so that is probably a salty sea tale or whatever.

Once, the walruses lived all over the Arctic waters, living in herds of hundreds, if not thousands of animals. Now, however, their numbers have fallen – even with the conservation efforts, the global warming is affecting them as well as the polar bears, and the walrus females are not that much more fertile than their polar bear counterparts are – they become sexually mature only at four to five years of age, and give birth to new pups only every three to four years. The pups in question grow slowly – for the first two years they feed only on milk, but during that time, they grow up to 2 m in length and over 300 kg in weight.

…The walruses supposedly grow until they reach about 20 years of age, and they live for a very long time, if they survived their initial childhood. Humans aside, the only animals that mess with fully grown walruses are killer whales and polar bears – and it’s a mixed bag with polar bears, (they prefer to go after walrus pups and females, not the mature males, and if they can afford it, they go for seals instead), and as for killer whales… I have not seen much evidence of killer whale on walrus attacks, so I am guessing that they would rather eat anything else than a walrus first, especially a mature male one.

Finally, here is a piece of the original fiction about it instead:

A walrus is a big and heavy beast. It looks like a bag of blubber, but got plenty of brawn too.

A walrus has two ivory tusks jutting from beneath the bristly moustache. It got flippers instead of feet, too. A walrus is an aquatic beast.

A walrus will dive deep and graze on the sea floor like a cow on a meadow. It eats seaweed and mollusks, and once it is done, the walrus will emerge, grab an ice floe or the shoreline with its tusks and get out of the water completely. It will lie down and sleep.

… 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!

Pathfinder: divine guardians

Also, here are a couple of divine guardians, (polar bear and walrus, duh) from Pathfinder Bestiaries, 4 & 5:

DIVINE GUARDIAN EMPEROR WALRUS CR 9

XP 4,800

N Gargantuan animal (cold)

Init –1; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision; Perception +25*

DEFENSE

AC 20, touch 5, flat-footed 20 (–1 Dex, +15 natural, –4 size)

hp 126 (12d8+72); fast healing 5

Fort +14, Ref +7, Will +8

Defensive Abilities ability healing; Immune cold, disease, mind-affecting effects, poison; Vulnerable fire

OFFENSE

Speed 20 ft., swim 60 ft.

Melee bite +16 (4d6+15/19–20) or slam +15 (2d6+15 plus trip)

Space 20 ft.; Reach 15 ft.

Special Attacks

Spell-Like Abilities (CL 12^th; concentration +10)

At will – dimension door, hold portal

3/day – alarm, knock

1/day – arcane lock, augury, clairaudience/clairvoyance, commune, dismissal, guards and wards

STATISTICS

Str 31, Dex 9, Con 22, Int 6, Wis 19, Cha 10

Base Atk +9; CMB +23; CMD 32 (can't be tripped)

Feats Diehard, Endurance, Improved Critical (bite), Iron Will, Vital Strike, Weapon Focus (bite)

Skills Perception +25*, Sense Motive +5*, Swim +22

SQ blessed life, divine swiftness, hold breath, sacred site

ECOLOGY

Environment cold oceans

Organization solitary, pair, or herd (1–3 and 5–20 walruses)

Treasure none

DIVINE GUARDIAN DIRE POLAR BEAR CR 9

XP 4,800

N Large animal (cold)

Init +7; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +23*

DEFENSE

AC 22, touch 12, flat-footed 19 (+3 Dex, +10 natural, -1 size)

hp 115 (10d8+70); fast healing 5

Fort +14, Ref +10, Will +6

Defensive Abilities ability healing; Immune cold, disease, mind-affecting effects, poison; Vulnerable fire

OFFENSE

Speed 40 ft., swim 20 ft.

Melee bite +15 (1d8+9), 2 claws +15 (1d6+9 plus grab)

Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft.

Special Attacks

Spell-Like Abilities (CL10th; concentration +13)

At will – dimension door, hold portal

3/day – alarm, knock

1/day – arcane lock, augury, clairaudience/clairvoyance, commune, dismissal

STATISTICS

Str 29, Dex 17, Con 25, Int 6, Wis 20, Cha 18

Base Atk +7; CMB +17 (+21 grapple); CMD 28 (32 vs. trip)

Feats Endurance, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Run, Skill Focus (Perception)

Skills Perception +23*, Sense Motive +5*, Survival +11, Swim +21

SQ blessed life, divine swiftness, sacred site

ECOLOGY

Environment cold coastlines or plains

Organization solitary or pair

Treasure none

Animal Face-off: Polar Bear vs. Walrus - July 7

With AoS on the leave until September, my blog suffers from a small hiatus of reviews. There were River Monsters, but, sadly, they have jumped the metaphorical shark – the last season, (one of the shortest ones yet), was committed to ‘mysteries of the deep’…

Okay, make no mistake – JW is still the man, and RM is still heads ahead of the swill that had been aired on ‘Shark Week’, for example, but compared to the previous seasons, ones that were focusing on proper fishing rather than something reminiscent of MonsterQuest, (which wasn’t a bad show in itself, but RW is still the better one), RM has certainly jumped the shark…and left the rivers for the ocean. It should rename itself, then, since it no longer deals with the rivers, and other bodies of freshwater, eh?

…That said, the main issue with the S8 of RM is the abruptness and shortness of the season – clearly it is not as popular as it once was, and perhaps it is time to end it, on a high note, before it is ended on a low one instead – but we got distracted. There are other good shows airing on the TV at the moment – the first season of ‘Preacher’, the second season of ‘Killjoys’ and of ‘Dark Matter’, the latest season of ‘Mistresses’ – but none of them are so intense as AoS, or AC (‘Agent Carter’) had been, which, considering that AoS isn’t all that great itself lately, is just sad.

(Of course, this isn’t just the TV – the movies too seem to suffer from something similar, and lately they are even scrapping their plans for various sequels, they are trying to achieve something original…so, we’ll have to see how it works.)

In any case, while I have been enjoying the new shows, I still went out to look for some old favorites of mine, including AFO, (‘Animal Face-Off’). It was a very good show back in the 2004, and certainly no less, (and no more) scientific than ‘Shark Week’ had been, for example. (And still is – ‘Shark Week’, that is). Sadly, after a single season, it got cancelled, but that is another story – you can still see it online even now, so let us not bitch too much about it.

Therefore, the episode I watched today was ‘Polar Bear vs. Walrus’, and the polar bear lost. Why? AFO, (being the sort of show that it was), has actually given the answer, (indirectly), to its audience, especially to those who had been paying attention to all the experiments done on (any given) episode.

What is a polar bear? It is a predator, a mammal of the order ‘Carnivora’. As such, basically, it is a typical carnivore, with teeth-studded jaws and powerful paws, armed with formidable claws. Like other bears (brown and black, for example), it uses paws to subdue its prey and teeth and jaws to dismember and eat it. If you compare skulls of a bear, (regardless if it is polar, grizzly, or black), and a weasel (short-tailed, long-tailed, etc.), and some other carnivore (or even their relatives, fur seals and sea lions), the skulls will be quite similar, especially if you look pass the differences in sizes and size-related differences. (This fact hints at the fact that weasels and bears are related to each other, however distantly, but we are not talking biological classification now.)

Put otherwise, a polar bear has a standard tool kit of a carnivore, not counting its’ size and strength. A walrus has not. It has a very different kit - one that is suited for defence, including against polar bears in question.

Technically, a walrus is a pinniped, not a carnivore, but the two orders of mammals are closely related to each other, BTW. Diet-wise, a walrus would eat shellfish and similar creatures rather than anything else, but in the past, there was some (anecdotal) evidence of orphaned walruses growing up to be more active hunters – of seals and similar sea life. I.e., it does have some mental hardware to be as formidable as a polar bear is, and perhaps even more so.

Moreover… as it was said before, the polar bear is a typical carnivorous mammal; it is also the biggest carnivorous mammal on Earth in the modern times and it is the top mammalian predator in the Arctic (not counting the killer whale, but the killer whale doesn’t live in the Arctic all the time – the polar bear does). It preys mostly on seals, but it will eat anything else, from the lemming (a small, vole-like rodent of the north) to the walrus in question – and everything else, alive or dead, in between. Sometimes it even captures the belugas and the narwhals – a northern species of toothed whales… The walrus has evolved precisely to stand-up to it. It has specifically evolved to be powerful enough to fend-off a polar bear – the big size, the thick armor of blubber, and the tusks: the polar bear’s presence was a powerful factor in the walrus’s evolution.

Yes, the evolution went both ways, and the polar bear, especially in theory, can take down a walrus…but it would rather eat something else. A ringed seal, or a harp seal, or a bearded seal…for example, not a walrus. Anything else but a walrus, really. And when the polar bear does charge a walrus, it is usually a cow or a calf – not a bull in its prime, as it was on AFO. A fight between a polar bear and a walrus is a long and exhaustive affair, unlike what AFO has shown, and moreover, the walrus has a better motivation (usually) - it is fighting for its like, unlike the polar bear...until the last few decades, when the global warming changed everything. 

…To add injury to insult, AFO has shown a polar bear hunt a walrus live, from footage that would later shown, (in 2006), on David Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’ TV series. There, a polar bear did attack a walrus – and the walrus got away, while wounding the polar bear very badly in the process (it died later on). I.e., polar bears tend to attack walruses only from desperation, and usually they lose. Usually, because lately the global warming had hit both them and walruses very badly; with the pack ice melting, both animals are being increasingly driven to the shoreline, where the polar bears have an advantage, especially in speed. If you ever see a TV program called ‘Polar Bear Battlefield’, you will see a pack of summer-weakened walruses being successfully overrun by equally hungry polar bears – and the bears won.

Polar bears and walruses have lived alongside each other for several thousand years at least, and have learned to coexist with each other within the cold Arctic Ocean and the adjoining tundra. Now humans are changing this balance of power – and both species are the losers. Let us reverse this disturbing trend of global warming – before it is too late.