Baby Pelican Seizures

In unsurprising news, parent pelicans feed their young. In more surprising news, however, it turns out that young pelicans undergo violent seizures just after they've been fed.

Unlike the effects of sugar on your usual five year old, however, a totally normal and healthy pelican child will seizure itself into unconsciousness after eating. What. Let me run that by you again, just so you can see exactly how much sense it doesn't make:

After eating, a child pelican will violently seize until it falls unconscious.

Fortunately for the pelican children, by looking into it a bit deeper, you can make it make sense. Hooray! Unfortunately for the pelican children, this is achieved by mentioned that mother pelicans drag their children around by the head before feeding them. "Roughly" was the precise adverb used. What the devil, mother pelicans? Why would you drag your children around by their heads at all, never mind do it roughly? Are you actively trying to encourage them to spaz into submission?

WHAT KIND OF PARENTS ARE YOU?

Anyway, I started writing this several hours ago, and then I went to the theatre to see Rent. It was pretty darn good and I recommend it! Kudos to all involved. Now I've forgotten my train of thought, but hey. You get the idea.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Cats and kittens, I'm about to blow your minds.

Today I learnt that there is a subset of academia who believe that the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens, compared to other apes, is due to us having evolved from aquatic apes. That is to say (in layman's terms), there are people who believe that we are, all of us, sea monkeys.

Keep in mind that this is just a theory, of course, not absolute solid fact. There is some pretty interesting evidence to support it, too. Activate: dot point mode!

• Bipedalism is a nonsense way of going about being terrestrial! It is stupid for your back, knees and organs. In the water, however, your torso and joints are supported and you can breathe more easily.
• We are pretty hairless! You know what other mammals are pretty hairless? Rhinoceroses and elephants, and we already know that they have aquatic ancestors. Also dolphins and whales! Need I say more?
• Our babies are fat. Apparently the specific type of fat (i.e. subcutaneous) is good for insulation and streamlining in the water.
• We have descended larynxes. Only (other?) aquatic mammals and large deer have this trait.

• A bunch of stuff in our nose to stop water from getting in there.
• Glands (sebaceous glands) all over our skin to produce a magical kind of lubricant.
• Our brains require iodine (and a few other things also), which is (are) most easily obtained from seafood.
• Voluntary breath control, which allows us to hold our breath under water, and also pronounce vowels! That is why lesser apes cannot speak our holy tongue. They can't breathe properly, because evolution did them wrong.
• Vestigial webbing between our fingers. I think most of us commented on how our hands looked like duck's feet when we were kids. Or maybe I just had a bizarre childhood.

• Our spawn have waxy coatings over them. Oh those crazy spawn of ours!
• Our kidneys. Apparently they are aquakidneys.

And, last but not least:

• The mammalian diving reflex!

Dot point mode, deactivate! DYOO dyoo dyooooo...

The mammalian diving reflex lets us stay underwater for a longer amount of time by optimising our breathing systems. It's like a Game Booster for our respiration system. Seals, otters and dolphins all have pretty strong MDFs, and we also have a cheap pirated version of it! Hooray for pirate diving reflexes!

The reflex itself works by slowing our heart rate down 10-25% as soon as our face comes in to contact with water below 21 C. That's pretty impressive, body! Unfortunately, seals do it better, dropping from 125bpm to 10bpm. So. Thanks for showing us up there, seals. After that, the blood in our hands and feet stops circulating, because hey, we don't need those! If we go deep enough, eventually everything except our brain and heart is cut off. Which is kind of creepy, in my opinion, but no one cares what a crazy man on the internet has to say about these sort of things.

Obviously, this all sounds pretty good for a case for the aquatic ape hypothesis. Unfortunately, most of the evidence can be explained more easily with a less radical account of human evolution. It isn't disproven or anything, I'm just sayin' so you don't all run around declaring us all to be merman.

I find the aquatic ape hypothesis interesting from a cultural perspective too, though. What if Atlantis isn't so far from the truth after all? And mankind has had a strong affinity with sailing and everything. Even the native Hawaiians canoed to New Zealand. I also read somewhere that water was "Jesus' element", since he walked on it and turned it to wine and was himself "the fisher of men" and all that. But water is also vital to our very lives, so I guess it's not that surprising that we should find a few cultural allusions to it.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Police sniffer dogs are trained using some chemical that isn't illegal. Which isn't surprising. I wish I could remember what it was.
• People get sleepy in the early afternoon, after lunch, because it's twelve hours after our sleepiest part of sleep and our biological clocks are whacky
• 'n', apparently. I have written 'n' on my hand to remind me of something else that was fascinating that I learnt today. I have no idea what it was, though.

Cancer and Crabs

So everyone knows that the animal symbol thing for the starsign Cancer is a crab, and everyone also knows that cancer is a horrific, painful disease. What you probably do NOT know, however, is that cancer the disease is named for the Lat root word that means 'crab', since the pain of cancer was described as being similar to that of being pincered by a crab. That makes a lot more sense now!

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The mineral dundasite was named after Dundas, in Tasmania, Australia
• 'Kibitz' is synonymous with 'chat'
• This is supposedly the most expensive painting in the world. I'm not joking.

Squirrels live for Six Years

Oh, squirrels. The adorable, fuzzy-tailed rodents we all know and love, unless you're a racist. A squirrel racist.

Their tails are SO fuzzy, in fact, that that's actually from when they acquired their name! Modern English 'squirrel', from Anglo-Norman 'esquirel' from Old French 'escurel' from the Lat 'sciurus', which you already know since their biological family is called Sciuridae (not to be confused with an ice cream sundae) which in turn comes from the Greek 'skiouros', meaning shadow tailed. Presumably the 'ski' part is the shadow, and I would assume that 'ouros' is the same as in 'ouroboros'.

Oh, it's funny how etymology works. That does explain why there are so many different species of squirrel, though; evolution had to go nuts (excuse the pun) to stop them from eating themselves to extinction, to the point where now, in the modern age, a happy, healthy, wild, average squirrel can merrily survive to the ripe old age of six.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Clouds have three stages of development
• The rate at which cane toads are killing off goannas is much higher than I previously thought
• President Obama would make an excellent stand-up comedian

Not All Kookaburras are Kookaburras

So I've known for a while now that kookaburras are kingfishers. For some reason, this information caught me off guard, like I was expecting kookaburras to be part of their own special super-secret club, and no one else was allowed to join.

But no. That's not the case at all. The family Halcyonidae, kingfishers, is home to the genus Dacelo, which is the kookaburras. As a quick recap for those who have forgotten their biological classifications, just remember your amusingly bad English:

PLEASE COME OVER FOR GAME SOCCER

They taught us that on my very first day of university so that we could remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, in that order, but the degree to which the phrase doesn't actually make sense (and the fact that it skips out Kingdom altogether) stuck it in my head, which actually makes it pretty useful as a mnemonic.

Kookaburras, then, are classed as:

K: Animalia

P: Chordata

C: Aves

O: Coraciiformes

F: Halcyonidae

G: Dacelo

We'll ignore, for the moment, that contemporary biological classification hasn't really quite caught up to birds being in the clade of theropods (my favourite sub-order, incidentally), and just accept the relevant piece of information here: kookaburras are in the genus Dacelo which is defined in a few (fairly sketchy) places as 'Australasian kingfishers'. That's

their 'thing'. That is the kookaburra hood, that is the kookaburra's turf, and that makes the family Halcyonidae a cosmopolite.

Unfortunately, that is not to be confused with a polite cosmonaut.

...though I agree, that would be more awesome.

A cosmopolite is a type of creature that can be found just about anywhere in the world (as opposed to being anywhere that is not the world, because they are polite cosmonauts and have no need for our terrestrial realm). For example, the class Insecta is cosmopolitan, as is the species Homo sapiens.

The inclusion of Dacelo in Halcyonidae is important for the kingfisher krew because they're now also in the Cool Cosmo Club. They're living it up where ever they want, including Australasia, because as you'll recall, Dacelo are the Australasian kingfishers.

Let's back up a moment.

"Australasia?" dudes are saying in confused voices. "Can we not just quickly define where, exactly, 'Australasia' is?"

Of course we can, dudes! All you need do is ask.

According to Wikipedia, which is not only conveniently bookmarked here but generally 'good enough' (technical term there) in terms of information quality, 'Australasia' consists of

Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea

and some other little islands of which no one else has really heard (sorry, the rest of Australasia).

So quick recap, Dacelo is:

• kookaburras
• Australasian kingfishers

and Australasia is:

• Australia
• New Zealand
• New Guinea
• et. al

So then, it stands to reason that if we grab a species of kookaburra, from, say, New Guinea, then it will be in the genus Dacelo.

It's time to introduce you to my friend, Clytoceyx rex.

Unfortunately, that is not to be confused with Tyrannosaurus rex.

...though I agree, that would be more awesome.

C. rex, known more commonly as the shovel-billed kookaburra, is a kookaburra from New Guinea. It is also the only non-Dacelo kookaburra, and is the sole representative of the genus Clytoceyx.

This, to me, to be honest with you, seems silly, and like the problem is primarily a linguistic one. I can't actually find any more definitive criteria for Dacelo beyond "Australasian kingfisher", and Clytoceyx is even less documented. The former was formally identified by William Leach in 1815, and the latter by Richard Sharpe in 1880. Maybe Sharpe just didn't know about Dacelo? How well was biological taxonomy centralised in the late 19th century? Or is there an actual, real, noticeable difference between Dacelo and Clytoceyx that I just can't identify by comparing pictures on Google Images?

Unfortunately, these are not to be confused with rhetorical questions. They are 100% genuine, my friends, and I'm not about to whip out some killer bio facts and put you all in awe of my genius.

...though I agree, that would be more awesome.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Carbon-13 has a natural abundance of only about 1%
• The world's largest cannon on wheels, the Jaivana, was cast in 1720
• Enough people still buy (and use!) Sony's products for the PS3 hack to be a big deal