Dankdag

TIL that every year at the Pieterskerk in Leiden, there is a thanksgiving service on American Thanksgiving [today, 4th Thursday in November] to commemorate the hospitality enjoyed in the city by the Pilgrims on their way to the New World. 

Since 1981, it seems that Butterball [since 2006, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carolina Turkeys: the largest turkey-slaughterers in the States] has funded a support line for the stressed and distraught during the holiday season - Thanksgiving, חֲנֻכָּה Hanukkah, Sinterklaas, Christmas, Kwanzaa. NYT made a micro-doc for behind the scenes. Something running that long is bound to accumulate a bunch of funny-peculiar anecdotes.

"I left my turkey in a snowbank to thaw and now I can't find it" 

This gave me frisson of recognition. During grad school in Boston, I took BI 504 Mammalogy with Tom Kunz [multiprev]. An integral part of the course was The Field Trip. We piled into a minibus and drove North far into New Hampshire bear (Ursus americanus) country. On Friday evening we arrived at a remote scout camp with wooden bunk dorms and primitive 'facilities'. Before dinner, as dusk was falling, we were instructed to lay out lines of snap-traps, wherever seemed good to us, as a way of sampling what small mammals might be present in the locality. I think the course had an old-style requirement to submit skins and skulls of a certain number of species.

Overnight 20cm of snow fell which made trap recovery a bit of a problem. But I was 40 years younger then two week event horizon and had a pretty good idea where my 10 traps were [at the foot of that spruce, under that fallen log, between the two rocks] and was able to recover them all . . . the last couple only by whacking the powdered snow with a stick until the trap exploded upwards. Not everyone was so lucky /organized  and the University had to suffer some shrinkage in its trap inventory. Tom was phlegmatic about the loss "If it hadn't snowed, some of those mice might have been carried away trap-and-all by something further up the food-chain".

Kunz was grievous bodily harmed by a car in while attending a 2011 Bat Conference but lingered on more or less bed-ridden, for 9 years before being carried away by CoViD in 2020.

I'm not proud of attempting to kill small mammals for no very good purpose. I killed a lot more later in the 80s, trying to establish an ethological connexion between melanin and adrenalin. Then again, I'm not righteous about [not] eating meat. But I've never had any grá for turkey, neither during the holidays nor at any time of the year. At least half my family agree that the key part of celebratory meals is the roast potatoes: everything else (gravy, stuffing, meat, brassica, carrots) acting in support. So:

Oy vey mezuzah

I finished off my very expensive education in graduate school in Boston. I had a desk in the Vole Lab which was down the corridor from Tom Kunz's Bat lab and across it from  Fred Wasserman's Bird Ethology lab. Not all the people with Mitteleuropa surnames were Jewish but some of them were and I learned a bit about Hannukah, lox & bagels, Shidduch, and Dreidels. It's kind of interesting when your neighbours have completely different holidays, peculiar food and nail things up on their doorways which aren't horseshoes . . .

. . . that would be a mezuzah מְזוּזָה: a little box or tube which holds a fragment of parchment. The words on the parchment start שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד׃ Hear O Israel, the lord our god, the lord is one. Which is a straightforward enough statement of faith. Th parchment is called a klaf and must be inscribed by a fully trained religious scribe called a sofer. Ballpoint pen will definitely not do and nor will 80gsm acid-free paper.  The rest of the text is an exhortation to to good and a promise of the god good things which will happen if the proscriptions are followed.  The mezuzah [L] is deliberately shown on a tilt because for some Jews that is part of the protective magic. Many believe that the little object will not only fend off divine wrath but also actual missiles if the neighbours get feisty. Nobody claims any particular mezuzah powers over everyday assailts on the home like junk-mail, dog-shit on the lawn, and hellish loud parties on the student house down the street.

Being a sofer seems a pretty secure gig, what with people moving home, upgrading their mezuzah to this years model, trying to out-mezuzah those Cohens next door. But I'm guessing that even a jealous god would look kindly on folks making home-made mezuzot. There are other Jewish specialists who hold local essential monopoly status a) the shochet שחיטה who slaughters animals in the prescribed way to ensure that the carcasses are kosher b) the mohel מוֹהֵל who does the circumcisions. Don't try these at home folks! Stick to the klaf-scribing if you want to save a bit.

When we lived in England through the 80s, the god-slot on the wireless was Thought for the Day, often read by a genial rabbi called Lionel Blue [shown R in his rabbinicals]. He died a few years ago in the fullness of years much loved by those who'd been braced to face the day by his slightly fey, whimsical, 3 minute morning monologues. In June 1985 I was given his T4tD paperback compendium called Bright Blue. You can get your own copy for £0.01. Our copy surface a couple of weeks ago and I rather like a story I found in there:

A Jewish family moves into a resolutely gentile neighbourhood. Everyone is curious about the new people and when they install the mezuzah someone asks about it. "It's just a box with a roll of paper inside which carries some verses from the bible". The neighbours cannot accept this bizarre explanation and a group of them go by night, unscrew the mezuzah and unroll the scroll. It says: "Help, I'm a prisoner in a mezuzah factory".

Orange is not the only . . . compost

🍊 Dan Janzen is now one of the grand old men of ecological science. He first loomed over my horizon shortly after I rocked up to graduate school in Boston. That same year Janzen published a paper in the Ann Rev Ecol & Syst entitled How to be a Fig. My attention was probably drawn to this overview of Ficus ecology by Pete August who was then completing his PhD with Tom "Batman" Kunz on How to be a fruitbat. Every fig that you eat is filled with egg-cases and a dead female wasp who has parasitized the fruit to lay her eggs and propagate her species. Without her pollinating invasion, no fruit. Without bats to eat the ripe figs - and shit out the seeds on the branches of a distant tree, there would be few new fig trees. And don't forget that the tree which hosts the fig-seedling will eventually get strangled in place soon after the fig roots have reached the ground and no longer need support. [bloboprev] It was stories like that which blew my sheltered European Ivory Tower mind: the diversity and inter-connectedness of the natural world were almost too complicated to comprehend.

🍊 Dan Janzen coursed over my horizon again in the middle of last week when my correspondent and independent researcher G [multiprev] flagged up a more recent research project which Janzen had started at the end  of the last century. With his wife Winnie Hallwachs, Janzen had been instrumental in creating the  Area de Conservación Guanacaste ACG in Costa Rica where they had been doing much of their field work. The ACG was an almost pathetic too little too late project to save a fragment of the old growth tropical forest which used to cover swathes of Central America. Stout Cortez and his conquistadors started the destruction of the alternative reality which was the New World in their rapacious looting for gold and god. Colonialism and capital had finished the job. 

🍊 The thing is that tropical forests are abundant but nutrient depleted. If a single tree falls, its resources are captured and recycled back to the community by an active army of beetles, termites and fungi. If an entrepreneur clear fells the trees to supply the market for hardwood cabinets for Japanese salarymen, then the recyclers are coincidentally done to death and the biomass is shipped abroad. There is little carbon left to sustain regrowth. In one sense, the timber is typically a windfall once-off bonus payment for the new owners of the land who plan to grow beef for hamburger or citrus for the morning OJ of the plain people of America.

🍊Janzen and the ACG struck an unlikely deal with Del Oro, one of the fruit-growing megacorps which had been responsible for replacing a great tract of mind-bogglingly diverse old growth forest with a neat monoculture of orange trees for the juice market. In exchange for a tract of still-a-forest which they owned, Del Oro would be permitted to dump their waste skin and squeeze-dried pith in part of the degraded once-upon-a-forest. Del Oro accountants considered that the exchange would be a nett gain for their share-holders, the papers were signed, and truckloads of bright orange garbage were shipped to the designated area. But within a year of the start, the scheme was brought up all standing by a spiteful law-suit by a rival juice company. TicoFruit fought their case, that Del Oro had "defiled a national park", up to the Supreme Court of Costa Rica; and won.The last truckload of 12,000 tonnes of skins was shipped before the cease-and-desist order was applied; and Del Oro and ACG walked away from the project.

🍊Fast forward 15 years. Tim Treuer, a graduate student from Princeton, had completed “It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road,is course work but needed a project on which to attach his thesis. He fell to talking with Janzen, who had a faculty position in the school, and it was agreed that the pile of orange skins in Costa Rica could bare looking at again. Treuer went South to scope the situation and couldn't even find the site. “It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn’t even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road". They upped a drone to capture the bird's eye view [L]. The side of the road which had been buried in orange skins was clearly different - and "better" - from the unremediated forest which had gotten only a whiff of decaying orange . . . and a blizzard to fruit-flies and fungal spores. The back of my envelope indicates that ½ a tonne of peel waste was deposited on every sq.m. Treuer et al. did plenty of science: measuring the height and girth of trees; counting species; comparing transects. But the picture is the executive summary.

🌳 In 15 years our 0.4 hectare forestette, with scarcely a single orange peel, has done well for carbon uptake and up-growth. Several of the trees, especially larch Larix europeaus, are now taller than our 2 storey home and as thick in the butt as my thigh. We've been talking with Sean the Forester [not the same as Seán the tree-surgeon!] about thinning in the tail end of this winter.

N🍊pe! It is not okay for you to take your organic-rich old mattress and drop it into a secluded culvert up in the hills: to increase the biodiversity and recycle nutrients, like.

It's not that simple

Do you like figs? Wasps? Well you can't have one without the other. When I was in Grad School in Boston, I was along the corridor from the lab of Tom Kunz, who taught us Mammalogy 504. He and his people worked on bats, not only the insect-eating chaps we're familiar with in Ireland but also the great flying fruit bats of the tropics. These lads are often part of a complex interacting network of mutually dependent species. The bats eat and disperse the fruit [bat gnawing fig L from Tim Laman] all over the jungle by eating the fruit off the tree and flying off somewhere quiet to digest it. In due course the seeds pass through the bat-gut and finish up as a smear on a tree-trunk, whence they sprout as a network of vines to grow up encircling and eventually strangling the tree. The flowers of the fig "tree", in contrast to garden flowers, develop like an ingrowing toe-nail with all the delicate bits on the inside and a tough exterior; it's called a syconium. Think daisy Bellis perennis rather than daffodil Narcissus poeticus because each syconium consists of multiple florets. There is a little pore at one end, through which the pollinating wasp enters. The female wasp is there to lay a clutch of eggs - for her the pollination is incidental - which hatch as larvae, eat some of the fruit and then exit as new flyers. Without the wasp no fruit is set. Without the bat, no dispersal. Don't think for a minute that figs are 'suitable for vegetarians' though: part of the treat is dead wasp bits. Getting your reproductive parts eaten away inside and out is a small price to pay for thus getting your offspring launched in the world. YMMV! And we have barely even mentioned the tree which supports the fig-tree and eventually gives its life for the system.

From our fuzzy-hearted perspective, some of the players enumerated above are nicer than others. These sort of woowah value judgments have given trouble to some god-botherers, including St Chuck: "I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice " (Charles Darwin). Did someone mention Ichneumons? There are at least 25,000 species of these hymenoptera (the bees, ants and wasps), most of which make a living by parasitising the larvae of other insects. But only because those other species will leave fat, juicy, nutritious morsels lying about unclaimed.

The females who lay the eggs which grow into the larvae sought by ichneumons go to some efforts to hide their progeny from predators; and the wasps exercise themselves to see or smell through these attempts at concealment. One of the better studied species is Ichneumon eumerus which is super-fussy about its host: only a larva of a particular blue butterfly Phengaris rebeli [synonym Maculinea rebeli] will do. Over the evolutionary eons, the butterflies got rather pissed off about this decimation of their progeny until one member of the species was born with a peculiar biochemical mutation. Its larvae produced a pheromone which made it smell remarkably like the larvae of Myrmica schencki a species of small ant; the ants thought so aNNyway and were therefore programmed to carry the butterfly larva back home to their nest and care for it - like cuckoos. For a while, the butterflies were safe from the attentions of the Ichneumon, until one of the latter learned how to find the nests of Myrmica schencki and determine if there were any butterfly larvae in there. If so, the gravid female darted into the ant nest and tried to deposit a clutch of eggs on the butterfly larva. Which led to a bit a barney as the ants tried to defend their trophy "offspring".  The wasps which succeeded left more of their own offspring into the next generation. One avenue to success was to develop and use another 'alarm' pheromone which made the ants run around in circles biting each other . . . thus allowing the wasp a window of egg-laying opportunity. These coils of mutual dependency are now impossible to dis-entangle.  Picture [R] of the dramatis personnae the ant is beige-on-grey to the L from the BBC.

Apart from the baroque inter-dependencies, the peculiar thing is the specificity of it all. No other butterfly larva smells quite right to either of the hymenopteran species. It looks probable that the larval pheromones of the butterfly and the ant are subtly different. Nat Geog suggests that teasing out the differences could help develop chemical agents to control the behaviour of insect pests. The butterfly pheromone is good enough to fool the ant, but different enough to encourage the wasp to assail the nest only if a butterfly larva's reek was wafting out the nest hole. You couldn't make it up! Then again, it suggests that our science is just skimming the surface of what we know about the natural world.

The wasp-ant-butterfly system is covered in a long list of natural peculiarities on http://bizarrecreature.blogspot.com/

Sir Clive's Stamps

Hip-hip, it is Sir Clive Sinclair's 73rd birthday today. When I left for graduate school in Boston, I left The Beloved behind in Cambridge, England with The Boy then aged four-and-a-bit.  It wasn't my proudest or most honourable move but I was driven.  So while I was getting to grips with multivariate statistics and environmental physiology, TB and tb were getting to grips with real life.  After some milling around, TB got a job in a creaky little office right opposite King's College chapel.  She was hired as office help and gopher in a teeny start-up company operated by a serial inventor called Clive Sinclair. 

He was just about to launch the first personal computer costing less than £100 - £99.95 indeed or you could get all the components in a plastic bag and solder it up yourself for £79.95.  It was the ZX80, it had 1 kilobyte of memory on board and needed a TV screen to display anything, a cassette-recorder to store anything and was loaded with Sinclair BASIC as a programming language.  You could, if you were geek enough, also tiptoe directly on the firmware and program in machine code.  It was neat, it was a triumph of appropriate technology, it was catchy . . . and it caught on in a huge way.  Cheques and International Money Orders poured in from all over the world and one of TB's many jobs was to open the envelopes and bank armfuls of cheques. 

For some reason (Oxfam?), she tore all the stamps off the incoming envelopes and put them in a biscuit tin.  Meanwhile back in Boston I was taking a course called Mammalogy with the great bat-expert (would that be chiroptologist?) Tom Kunz.  So, from sitting at the feet of the master, I knew a bit about the taxonomy and characteristics of animals that suckle their young.  When I came back to Europe the following Summer, I went through the biscuit-tin, abstracted all the representations of mammals and stuck them onto sheets according to their evolutionary relationships.  When we tricked about with stamps as children, the standard album was arranged alphabetically by country, which is another way of looking at the world.

I think that picture is rather fine.  I have another copy of the Heimskatarefur stamp in my taxonomic collection.  You can see from the postmark that someone in Isafjordur, Iceland wanted a teeny amount of compute-power in July 1981 that would change their life forever.  Nobody sends letters anymore - on dit que the average person in Britain sends one and receives two personal letters each year - so it doesn't matter that all internal letters in Ireland are now post-marked "Port Laois" where the national sorting office is.  But really! Why bother specifying something wholly redundant?

So today I'll give Sir Clive a slightly off-centre tribute to say:

 "So long and thanks for all the stamps".