DC Animal News Examiner

I'm now the Animal News Examiner for the Washington, DC section of Examiner.com!

I'll be writing about everything animal in DC. Check out my page here, and tell all your friends. Tell your loved ones. Tell your pets.

Leviathan

A sea monster has been unearthed! The fossilized remains of a giant whale-beast were found in 12 million year old sediment in Peru. It appears to be related to modern sperm whales: about the same size, but armed with 40 cm (16 inch) teeth on both the upper and lower jaws. From the BBC article:

A 3m-long fossilised skull of the creature was discovered by researchers in southern Peru in 2008. Dr de Muizon's student, Olivier Lambert was among them.


"It was the last day of our field trip when one of our colleagues came and told us that he thought he'd found something very interesting. So we joined him and he showed it to us," he said.


"We immediately saw that it was a very large whale and when we looked closer we saw it was a giant sperm whale with huge teeth."


The teeth were more than twice the length and diameter of those found in modern sperm whales and they were on the upper and lower jaws.

The researchers estimate that the creature probably measured more than 17 meters (56 feet!) long, and may have preyed on other whales. In a tribute to Moby Dick (one of my favorite books), they've named the whale Leviathan melvillei. 

Nature Video has a feature on Leviathan:





The paper is in Nature:

The Giant Bite of a New Raptorial Sperm Whale
Nature, Vol. 466, Issue 7302, 1 July 2010

Whaling news + new art

After a week-long circle jerk, the 62nd International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco has ended. The 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling remains in place, but no progress has been made. From the WWF:

But it could have been worse. The IWC was considering a worrying new proposal that could allow commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean for the first time in almost 25 years – and would also set commercial whaling quotas for whales listed as threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).


WWF has always fully supported the maintenance of the IWC’s 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling. Unfortunately, whaling at a commercial scale continues by a small number of countries. We want to see all whaling come under stricter IWC control.

An interview with Iceland's "whaling king" reveals the jackassery that environmentalists face in some countries:

Kristjan Loftsson, Iceland's millionaire whaling king, doesn't really see the difference: "whales are just another fish," he said at a crunch meeting of the International Whaling Commission.


...


Loftsson is untouched by a wave of recent research showing that cetaceans -- the order grouping whales, dolphins and porpoises -- are closer to humans that once thought in their ability to communicate, recognizing themselves in a mirror, and create what anthropologists would call culture.


"I don't believe it. If they are so intelligent, why don't they stay outside of Iceland's territorial waters?" he shot back, attributing such ideas to "a bunch of crazies."

Yup. The stupid, it burns.

A few more recent articles on cetaceans:

• Chicago biologist fears Gulf oil threat to dolphins
• Russia's new oil exploration threatens gray whales
  

And a new painting!

Sick

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University has been up to some pretty sick shit. Concerned parents bring their little girls to the good doctor and express their worries. Their worries, namely, that their developing child's clitoris is too large. The WTF factor only snowballs from here. Dix Poppas performs a "nerve-sparing" surgery on the little girls (most are around six years old) in which he removes the offending tissue from the shaft of the clitoris, then reattaches the glans to what little remains. 

Imagine growing up with the knowledge that your parents found the most private, sensitive part of your body so aesthetically disturbing, so very ugly that they arranged to have it chopped up by a creep who would later masturbate you as they watched. Ugh. 

I have few words to describe exactly how wildly unethical this is. Here's a Pharyngula post on the topic, and the original post from Psychology Today. The comment threads are worth reading and rather cathartic. Dan Savage has also caught wind of this, and has a long, passionately written post at the Stranger.

From Dan Savage's post:

There's lots to be outraged about here: there's nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there's no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl's clitoris because it's "too big" has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm. But what's most outrageous is how Poppas is "proving" that his surgery "spares nerves." Dreger and Feder:


But we are not writing today to again bring attention to the surgeries themselves. Rather, we are writing to express our shock and concern over the follow-up examination techniques described in the 2007 article by Yang, Felsen, and Poppas. Indeed, when a colleague first alerted us to these follow-up exams—which involve Poppas stimulating the girls’ clitorises with vibrators while the girls, aged six and older, are conscious—we were so stunned that we did not believe it until we looked up his publications ourselves.


Here more specifically is, apparently, what is happening: At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch.... Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls....

I encourage you to vent your disapproval/outrage here (Weill Cornell Medical College contact form).


Now for something completely different: in the runup to next week's IWC meeting in Morocco,   celebrities are joining the "fight against whaling". If you're a Doctor Who fan, the wonderful Christopher Eccleston has gotten behind the cause. The BBC article also outlines the agenda for the meeting, which will probably result in the 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling being overturned. Environmental groups are, of course, up in arms against this. More information is here, at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society website. If you'd like to subscribe to their blog, the RSS feed is here.

Friendship

If the last post got you down, you must watch this. Made my day.

Watch more National Geographic Channel videos on AOL Video

Good news, very bad news

First, the good news: Australia is set to pursue legal action against Japan for its illegal whaling program. From the Beeb:

The Australian government says it will lodge formal proceedings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague next week.


The move comes ahead of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Morocco next month, where agreement is being sought on a new approach to whaling, which would allow commercial hunting but with strict quotas.


Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett and Attorney General Robert McClelland said in a joint statement that the move underlines their "commitment to bring to an end Japan's program of so-called scientific whaling".

And now the bad news. The first picture I've seen of a dolphin killed by the BP oil spill has hit the internet. A warning: this picture is graphic and may at the very least ruin your day. Click here.

Finally, Ann Weaver in Tampa wrote an article a few days ago about the effects of the spill on local dolphin populations. She reviews what little we know about the devastating damage the spill has done to the food chain, and speculates that dolphins will not be able (or willing) to leave the area.

From the article:

Couldn’t our adult dolphins just move, just head north or south where there was less oil or more food? Possibly. But even if the waters were unequally disturbed by the oil, and there were healthy waters to go to, dolphin psychology could keep the dolphins from fleeing the meltdown.


One, dolphins are pretty free-form but they do have habits. Changes during construction on the John's Pass Bridge further suggest that their habits die hard. They may stick to their habits despite diminishing food and water quality.


Two, dolphins live in home ranges, which are where they’re found most often. They may stick to their home ranges despite diminishing food and water quality. About sixty of the dolphins we’ve seen are residents who would stick around John’s Pass.


Finally, there’s the glaring psychological difference between humans and other animals: Humans move. Animals don’t. Granted, some animals migrate to another troop at maturity. But animals become endangered or extinct because, when humans destroy their habitat, the animals either have no place to go or don’t know to go.


Randy Wells of Mote Marine described our coastline as a mosaic of overlapping dolphin home ranges.


Let’s say, for the sake of argument, our local dolphins found John’s Pass untenable and decided to move. They would encounter dolphins already living in every area they went. There are no free waters where “our” dolphins could go.


Another major concern of mine is the expansion and potential connection of dead zones. A dead zone is an area of water that is so depleted of oxygen that no sea creatures can live in it.


The Gulf of Mexico already has a dead zone the size of the state of Massachusetts, created by the fertilizers that get into the mighty Mississippi from America’s breadbasket and end up in the Gulf. Lesser dead zones (if there is such a thing) pock the Western Florida shoreline. God forbid these all get together.

A bleak forecast.

Gulf spill

Lazy though I may be, I think the unfolding environmental disaster in the Gulf deserves a mention.

First, NPR has a story on a group of scientist and engineers who have calculated the daily output of the broken pipe and come up with an estimate that is dramatically higher than the official numbers. 

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.


A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.


The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

Wereley's calculations were backed up by scientists and engineers at other institutions. Needless to say, BP disputes these figures. But even at BP's absurdly low estimate - 5,000 barrels a day - this is shaping up to be even worse than the Exxon Valdez spill.

Deborah Blum over at ScienceBlogs has a post on the relative toxicity of the oil in the Gulf and the chemical dispersant being used to break it down. The standard toxicity test for chemical compounds is called the LD50. LD stands for Lethal Dose and 50 indicates 50 percent. So, LD50 means the lowest dose at which a material kills half of the test subjects. Blum did some digging on the LD50s for crude oil and the dispersant being used (Corexit 9500) and came up with some distressing results: turns out that pouring Corexit 9500 on crude oil actually makes the resulting mixture even more toxic.

The results differ by species and by time as well as by amount of poison, The EPA numbers for Corexit 9500 (the formula used most heavily by BP) show that at 2.62 ppm, the dispersant kills half the silver fish in 96 hours/ four days. At a slightly higher concentration - 3.4 ppm - the compound kills half the little shrimp in two days.


As for crude oils, a very decent analysis by the American Petroleum Institute shows that all are toxic, but their effects vary with thickness and with the different chemistry seen in say, oil from the Gulf of Mexico and oil from Kuwait. The best estimate I've seen for South Louisiana Crude - after hours of exasperated research - comes from thesis work done at Louisiana State University several years ago. For instance, the study found that Louisiana crude had an LC50 of 4250 ppm for the warm-water loving killifish.


This suggests that crude oil is less acutely poisonous than chemical dispersants. But here's the really interesting finding in that terrific little study. Adding a dispersant - specifically Corexit 9500 - made the oil more poisonous. A lot more poisonous.


The "dispersed" oil had an LC50 of 317.7 ppm, making it more than 11 times more lethal in its effects. The study found a similar worsening for white shrimp, although not quite as dramatic. "Dispersed oils were more toxic than crude oils," noted the report.

Finally, The Big Picture has a feature on the spill. I highly recommend it. Beautiful pictures of awful stuff.

Bottlenose dolphins swim through oily water

The birds and the B's

Jarbas Agnelli saw a picture of some birds sitting on some telephone wires. Another person might have just seen birds. He saw notes.

Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Gray whale in the Med

A gray whale has been spotted... in the Mediterranean Sea.

 Here he is, off the coast of Israel

From the article:

A gray whale has appeared off the coast of Israel, shocking conservationists.


Gray whales are thought to be extinct across the Atlantic Ocean, so the appearance of an individual within the Mediterranean Sea is a major surprise.


The whale may have inadvertently travelled a huge distance from its natural habitat thousands of kilometres away in the Pacific Ocean.


However, it raises the possibility that gray whales have returned to former haunts in the western hemisphere.


"This discovery is truly amazing. Today, gray whales only inhabit the Pacific Ocean, so to find one in the North Atlantic, let alone the Mediterranean Sea, is bizarre in the extreme," says Nicola Hodgins of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS), which has its headquarters in Wiltshire, UK.

Your average human next to your average gray whale (image from Wiki)

The end is nigh

I'm counting hours until the end of undergraduate classes forever and ever and ever. This is beyond strange. It hasn't been four years. They're lying to me. My cap and gown are stashed away in my sock drawer, still in their plastic because I'm scared to open them up. I walk in a month and two days.

Locked myself in and stayed up for a few days this week staring at this screen and contemplating my thesis with a growing sense of existential horror. Sort of like this, but silently and in a library. I am cautiously optimistic, however. If I keep going long enough, it is statistically probable that I will produce a work of profound insight and great intellectual beauty:

Mammals in the House

Congress has scheduled a hearing on marine mammal captivity, the Orlando Sentinel reports. The House Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife will meet on April 27th to hear testimony. Animal welfare advocates hope the meeting will lead to tighter regulations on the industry, which has had some of its not-so-shiny areas brought to light by the recent death of a SeaWorld trainer by a killer whale in Orlando and the Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," about dolphin captures in Japan.

From the article:

The Sun Sentinel explored the world behind marine parks in a 2004 investigative series. It found that over the previous three decades, about 1,500 sea lions, seals, dolphins and whales in marine parks had died at a young age, some from human hazards such as capture shock and ingestion of coins and foreign objects.

The industry took root in Florida when the first marine park, Marineland of Florida, opened in 1938, and fostered an international trade with killer whales now worth up to $5 million each.

Until the 1980s, many of the marine stars came from the wild, with Florida waters supplying bottlenose dolphins that ended up at parks in Europe, Israel and Canada. U.S. attractions stopped capturing marine mammals more than 15 years ago and now rely on breeding.

Today, of the 1,243 marine mammals in the nation's parks, zoos and aquariums, only 15 percent were caught in the wild, a Sun Sentinel analysis of federal data shows. Another 14 percent were found stranded on beaches, and the rest were born in captivity.

Sarah over at WaterNotes, a conservation blog, has some further thoughts on the hearing:

This is a huge development for many reasons and – I feel – a golden opportunity for zoos and aquariums to give a voice to their husbandry practices, reveal their missions, and inform the public about the size and scale of their education and conservation programs.  It’s a chance to separate the institutions who get it right (and most likely carry AZA credentials) and those that have a long way to go.  It is also a chance to discuss what the role of zoos and aquariums can be and what more they can do, towards fulfilling the obligations of the MMPA [Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, info here and here] to use contact with and observation of marine mammals to inspire our next generation of ocean advocates and stewards.

Yet more whales

Slate has another thoughtful, well-written meditation today on whales, humans, and our conflicted relationship over the course of history. Whales have played many roles. First they were sea monsters: Leviathans, lurking in the places on the map you didn't go. Then to some they became sustenance. Then they became the illumination, the perfume, and the corsets of the 19th century. They have been myth, food, money and light, but we still know very little about them. As the piece notes, we knew what the Earth looked like from space before we knew what a sperm whale looked like underwater.

Whales are something different now. They've always been objects of curiosity, but now they are the subjects of intense research and the darlings of an adoring public (Save The Whales!). The piece ends:

The truth is now, as it's ever been: We need whales more than they need us. Once we hunted them for their industrial resources. Now we demand to be entertained by them. What they want, most probably, is to be left alone.

In other news, one dolphin and possibly two swam up Newtown Creek in Brooklyn today. The creek is one of the most polluted industrial dead zones you can imagine, swamped with factory waste and raw sewage. No word on what's going to happen, but it doesn't look good.

More on whales

Slate has an article today on whaling... did we save the whales or what?

It's a summary of current whaling policy, new developments on same, and what they've actually done since the Save the Whales movement got going. From the article:

"...the sperm whale is considered vulnerable (the level below endangered), while five others—including that 1970s singing sensation, the humpback whale—are of least concern, meaning they're not going extinct anytime soon, even though they might not have returned to their pre-whaling levels. Most hunters nowadays pursue the common minke whale, which is also doing pretty well, all things considered. For a few other large whale species, there aren't enough data to make calls in either direction.

Things get more complicated, though, when you drill down and look at subpopulations. For example, humpback whales may doing fine as a general rule, but the ones that live in the Arabian Sea are considered endangered, as are those around Australia and the South Pacific. And then there are the humpbacks around South Georgia, which were mostly wiped out between 1904 and 1915 and have yet to come back.

What if, somehow, we could return the world's whales to some kind of pristine, pre-human state? If it could be proven that the hunts wouldn't push any populations into the danger zone, would environmentalists in countries besides Japan, Norway, and Iceland ever support sustainable, commercial whaling? The Lantern has her doubts. In America, at least, our belief in the essential dignity of these big, beautiful mammals seems just too ingrained to allow for their use as a food source. In the end, that may be the greatest legacy of the "Save the whales" movement."

The Cove has an interesting segment on what has happened to whaling since the movement began. Needless (almost) to say, it draws a slightly more pessimistic conclusion. In the film, key figures of the movement lament the passing of the enthusiasm that fired the cause, and call for a revival of the activism that brought it into public view. Things have stalled. In the 80s, there used to be marchers on the Mall, singing and holding signs, demanding an end to the slaughter. In the cloudy early reaches of my memory, I remember Save the Whales! t-shirts, posters, and shopping bags being everywhere. They were nearly as ubiquitous as those D.A.R.E t-shirts were before they were retro and ironic.
 Sure, the situation has gotten better, but it's still not great. We've left the task unfinished. Given the current pace of things, it's going to remain unfinished for a long time.

Whaling, torture, beer

Updates, developments, and tactical nuclear beer. Read on...
 
Whaling

A development on a previous post on whaling and the dolphin drives: an article from the BBC's Richard Black on the International Whaling Commission and its most recent proposals. The new plans aim to regulate whaling "in a way that countries still engaged in the hunt and those opposed to it could both live with."   

Politics, of course, is central. From the article:

If the proposals were adopted, then, anti-whaling governments would find themselves partaking in the setting of quotas for hunts that according to their own beliefs ought not to exist at all, and in the knowledge that they will be probably be excoriated by environment groups on an issue where public opinion in their countries is pretty firmly on the environment groups' side.

Meanwhile, governments of hunting nations would have to be prepared to accept quotas that are below levels urged by companies operating the hunts. This could be a particularly thorny problem in Iceland where the whaling industry is urging the public to see it as a creator of wealth and employment in a time of economic hardship.

The biggest issue of principle, meanwhile, is that this plan would not remove or even phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean, where Japanese harpoons are busiest.

 Torture

In an update to this post, an article in Slate does a post-mortem on the Bush years, honing in on the lawyers behind the throne. As the writer puts it, we've erased the legal lines surrounding torture and replaced them with nothing. From the article:

The rule of law requires that there be a floor. For decades most of us believed that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was such a floor. Its bar against "[o]utrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment," was clearly meant to apply not just to POWs or battlefield soldiers in uniform but to all captives. Common Article 3 was intended to be the lowest we went, as Aziz Huq has written: "the point beyond which no nation can go without losing its claim to dignity and honor." But then along came the Bush lawyers, and they managed to saw into the floorboards. A sub-basement for prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo opened beneath us, and our dignity and honor disappeared into it.

Beer

Finally, a propos of nothing, exciting developments in beermaking!

A controversial Scottish brewery has launched what it described as the world's strongest beer - with a 32% alcohol content.

Tactical Nuclear Penguin has been unveiled by BrewDog of Fraserburgh.

BrewDog was previously branded irresponsible for an 18.2% beer called Tokyo, which it then followed with a low alcohol beer called Nanny State.

I want some. Also, 10 points for calling it "Nanny State".

More animals + Saturn

An octopus hatching and being sly with a jar!

Slow loris! Being tickled!



The slow loris is endangered, but these people live in Russia, where it's not illegal to keep one. Not sure how I feel about that, but it seems very very happy to be tickled.

And Saturn. Hubble turned its eye on Saturn the other day and captured a movie of aurorae going on both poles of the planet. Story here.

Octopus!

This is incredible. Bioluminescent deep sea creatures and chameleonescent cephalopodian madness. Skip to 4:21 (and full screen it) to have your mind blown.

Non-human persons

There's an AAAS conference coming up in San Diego, focusing on the ethical implications of dolphin intelligence. Several very interesting people will be speaking. A few of them are quoted in this article, which outlines the ongoing controversy about intelligence and animals and what it means, or should mean, to us. The abstract for the conference:

The dolphin brain has a large cerebral cortex and a substantial amount of associational neocortex. Most anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain. More important, recent research in marine science has revealed that dolphins have a remarkable degree of cognitive and affective sophistication. For example, dolphins can recognize their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves -- a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants. These and other studies, which have found that dolphins are also capable of advanced cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, artificial language comprehension, and complex social behavior, indicate that dolphins are far more intellectually and emotionally sophisticated than previously thought. Considerable research indicates that they are significantly different from fish and other marine species, and this research has significance for commercial policy and practice. This symposium will present the scientific findings and explore their ethical and policy implications.