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Happy Earth Day! I am afraid I am a bit under the weather (which seems appropriate, since our beautiful blue planet is catching a fever too). However it is worth devoting some time today to thinking about our planet and the entwined webs of ecosystems which support all living things (very much including human beings).
The great masters of global capitalism claim that the Earth is inexhaustible and made solely for human delights. To hear them tell it, only if ever more people consume ever more consumer rubbish will we all thrive. However that claim always seemed suspect, and the notably swift decline of entire ecosystems within even my lifetime suggests that fundamental aspects of our way of life and our long-term goals need to be rethought. It is a formidable problem because the nations of Earth are facing a near-universal political crisis where authoritarians are flourishing and democracies are faltering. So far, the authoritarians don’t seem substantially concerned with a sustainable future for living things (or with any laudatory goal, really). This trend could get worse in the future as agricultural failures, invasive blights, and extreme weather events cause people to panic and flee to “safe” arms of the dictators (this would be a stupid choice since strongmen, despots, and tyrants are anything but safe in a any context).
These frightening projections of doom are hardly a foregone conclusion though. A great many people of all political and ideological stripes are worried about the future and are working hard to ensure that humankind and all of our beautiful extended family on the tree of life make it into the future. Part of this is going to involve engineering and biomedical breakthroughs, but political and cultural breakthroughs will be needed as well.
I am ill-prepared to write out my proposals at length (since I would really like to lie down with some ginger ale), but fortunately I am a visual artist and I spent the winter of 2018 preparing a dramatic planetary image to capture my own anxiety for the world and its living things without necessarily giving in utterly to my fears and anxieties. I was going to introduce it later, but EarthDay is a good time to give you a sneak peak (plus it goes rather well with my Maundy Thursday blog post).
Here is the Great Flounder–the allegorical embodiment of how Earth life if everywhere under our feet and around us, but we can’t necessarily fathom it easily, because of our scale. Speaking of scale (in multiple ways I guess), I continue to have trouble with WordPress’ image tool, so I am afraid that you will have to make due with this small image until I learn about computers…or until posters get printed up (dangit…why do we have to sell ourselves all of the time?). In the meantime here is a teaser detail to help you in your own contemplation of if/how we can make Earth a paradise for ourselves without destroying it for the other inhabitants.
We will talk more about this soon, but in the meantime happy Earth Day. We will work together to save our giant blue friend, I know it! Let’s just collaborate to do so before we lose African elephants, numbats, mysterious siphonophores, or any of our beloved fellow lifeforms on this spherical island hurtling through space.
We have had a lot of excitement the last couple of weeks, what with Halloween and the midterm election. Let’s relax a little bit with [checks notes] the horrifying story of a dare gone wrong which lead to the tragic death of a young man? What?? Who chooses this content? Gah!
Well, anyway, this story comes from Australia where, in 2010, teenager Sam Ballard was hanging out with his mates (which is what Australians call friends) and drinking some wine when a small garden slug crawled across his friend’s patio. In a manner instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with teenage boys, the young men jokingly dared one another to eat the tiny mollusk, and, to show them up, Sam gulped down the tiny creature. This proved to be an irreversible, fatal error. Soon Sam’s legs began to hurt and then he fell into a coma for more than a year. Sam regained consciousness but he was paralyzed and subject to a host of dreadful ailments which ultimately killed him a few days ago.
There may be a moral to this sad horror story (particularly in the States where, in 2016, 46.4% of the electorate made a seemingly trivial– albeit disgusting–choice which is paralyzing and killing our nation), however there is certainly a scientific explanation. Slugs can carry rat lungworm disease which is caused by a parasitic nematode called Angiostronjilus cantonensis (crustaceans and frogs can carry the worm as well). In the happy normal course of existence, the slugs, crabs, and frogs (and thus the nematodes) are eaten by rats which develop lungworm infection in, you know, their lungs. They excrete droppings infected with lungworms which in turn are eaten by slugs and small invertebrates which are then eaten by rats and frogs. This nematode was originally indigenous to Southeast Asia and nearby Pacific Islands, however as the climate changes and humans move around (taking rats and nematodes with us, apparently) the microscopic worms have spread to Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.
I enjoy nature and have a deep appreciation of ecosystems and all of their diverse inhabitants, yet somehow the preceding paragraph makes me want to burn away rats, frogs, slugs, and nematodes with cleansing fire and live like Howard Hughes. Speaking of fire, if you must eat rats, frogs, garden slugs, small invertebrates, or nematodes, you should thoroughly cook them first. I guess that is a really useful and ancient pro tip for success in life.
There is a bigger reason I am telling this upsetting story though. Strange microscopic bits of one ecosystem have a way of getting into other ecosystems and causing complete havoc. Rat lungworms don’t even really have anything to do with humans, but when mistakenly consumed by us, they do not end up in our lungs but instead in our brains (btw, this is bad news for the nematodes too, which are unable to complete their natural revolting nightmare life-cycle).
Paleontologists have long speculated that this sort of mix-up is a factor in many mass die-offs and other large scale extinction events. Fossil evidence for such things however is exiguous, so they have to look for analogous situations in the modern world (like the case of poor Sam Ballard) or go digging in the genomes of modern living organisms. These genomes often do carry information about a long strange history of fighting off weird viruses, pathogens, and microscopic invaders, but it is not easy to figure out the specifics within the Rube Goldberg-style world of immune cell epigenetics. Zookeepers and stockpeople (and their veterinary pathologists), however, know all about these sorts of dark misconnections from horrible sad incidents which happen all the time in farms and zoos. I suppose I am bringing this up because I suspect that climate change, near instant international travel, and modern supply chains, will continue to amplify the problem (I have touched base concerning this in my essays about parasitoid wasps, but these may be a touch abstract, so I am telling Sam Ballard’s story).
We could spend more time and money understanding biology properly to get ahead of these trends (which will be greatly magnified in any synthetic ecosystems which we build on Earth or beyond), or we could continue with our current choice of giving all of our resources to corrupt billionaires to hoard. While we ponder that choice, let us extend our deepest condolences to the Ballards for their terrible loss. I am also going to clean my kitchen with bleach and maybe take a shower.
Microbeads through a Microscope
Back when I was at school in the 90s there was a breathless sense that we all lived on the threshold of a nanotech revolution. In the future we would quaff chalices filled with infinitesimal robots and the little machines would devour our cancers and grant us superpowers. Flash forward to 2015 and what we have instead is microbeads. These are exactly what they sound like–polyethylene microspheres which have worked their way into consumer goods of every sort. Microbeads were supposed to “exfoliate” or “microcleanse” or perform some other nebulous pseudoverb dreamed up by marketers. What they really do instead is abrade microfissures into our gums before passing through the filters of water treatment plants and pouring into the world’s rivers, lakes, and oceans. In these larger ecosystems, the beads soak up pollutants and are mistaken for eggs by tiny arthropods and fry. The infernal little spheres are working their way into the food chain and causing havoc.
Ahh…consumer goods!
Ferrebeekeeper believes that technology is the solution to most problems. This blog often excoriates the powers that be for not moving fast enough to bring us breakthroughs and marvels. So why are we featuring the troubling story of microbeads? First (and most-obviously) because technology only works if we all pay close attention and correct errors and problems as they occur. This is no easy task when dealing with systems as complicated as those seen in biology and ecology.
More importantly it is a rebuke to the market system. There is a certain segment of society which continuously holds aloft the market as the final and greatest arbiter of what is right and best. This seems dangerously misguided. The market prefers expensive baldness therapy, instantly obsolete cellphones, and microbeads to the expensive and abstract research into fundamental science where real breakthroughs come from. The market is a single shiny gimcrack in our collective box of tricks for dealing with the world, but it should not be mistaken for the toolbox…or the world! Markets are better at making a few charlatans rich then for helping us all understand existence.
Microbeads glowing under UV light inside some little larval water creature
Let’s remove little beads from our soap and work a bit harder in the nanotech laboratory. We are not getting any younger and some of those little cancer eating robots might come in handy…provided they are not brought to us at a horrifying markup by Ciba-Geigy (and then end up eating our spleens). If we do not work a bit harder to correct the excesses within our resource allocation system, we are going to end up with more micro cleanse and less true understanding.
We want nanobots but we need them to work right or the consequences could be unpleasant!
Clouds of reef fish and corals at Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
I know I just did a post on National Donut Day, but that piece was both tongue-and-cheek and nakedly self-interested. Clearly donuts are ephemera with transient importance—scraps of fried dough which stay tasty for less time than flowers bloom (indeed I enjoy juxtaposing their cheap impermanence with the vast seemingly eternal universe in my paintings). Today I looked at my calendar to find that June 8th is World Oceans Day! Unlike National Donut Day (which is self-evidently a meretricious marketing “holiday”), World Oceans Day strikes me as an important and worthwhile day of observance. The ancients celebrated the oceans with festivals and sacrifices to venerate the sea gods. We tend to regard the oceans as an inexhaustible source of cheap fish and a place to dump our rubbish. I worry that the careless industrialized spoiliation of the oceans is the gravest mistake humankind is currently making (and we have our grubby grasping fingers in lots and lots of pies—and are making plenty of errors). Yet, I don’t want this blog to become an angry jeremiad or an environmentalist harangue. I want to celebrate the beauty and grace of the oceans and their inhabitants while also underlining the stress and danger which these vast swaths of the world are facing. What to do?
An infestation of Crown-of-Thorns Starfish
For World Ocean Day therefore I am writing about the lifeform which, to me, most exemplifies the oceans of the late Holocene/early Anthropocene, the crown-of-thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci. This echinoderm is a ravenous poisonous destroyer which is exploiting the sickness of the oceans to proliferate and succeed wildly (at the expense of everything else). It is an amoral ravenous monster covered with toxic spines which is eating the coral seas bare. It is also a beautiful creature magnificently evolved to thrive—we can hardly hold its horrifying success against it. Maybe it should be on the cover of Forbes smoking a cigar and bloviating about its philosophy of success. By chance the starfish also lies at an intersection of many blog topics—crowns, invaders, colors, poison, mollusks (for its fate is connected with that of predatory mollusks), opinion, and science…perhaps even “deities of the underworld”. This is a lot of introduction…let’s meet our antihero!
Crown of Thorns (Acanthaster planci) photo by jon hanson
The crown-of-thorns starfish (or “sea star”), Acanthaster planci takes the form of a spiked disk with up to 21 prehensile arms (also covered in spines). On its underside, the starfish has numerous sticky tube-like suction feet running along the bottom of each arm. These legs run in parallel rows beside a series of closely fitting plates which form a central groove on the bottom of each arm. The arm grooves each run ominously into the starfish’s horrifying stomach/mouth. The starfish can grow to a diameter of up to 80 centimeters (31 inches) although they are more commonly found in the 35 centimeter range. Acanthaster planci has a wide Indo Pacific range and lives in tropical and semitropical coastal waters from the Red Sea and the East Coast of Africa across both the Indian and Pacific Oceans all the way to the West Coast of Central America. The starfish are usually dull grays and reds but they can range to brilliant purple, blue, orange, aqua (or display all sorts of mixed ranges). Their colors are highly mutable and variable! 
These starfish eat coral polyps! It crawls into corals by means of its many sucker feet—compressing or elongating its body as needed. When in position the starfish extrudes its stomach over the polyps it wishes to eat: the stomach can cover an area approximately equal to the starfish. The creature then releases digestive compounds which dissolve the soft parts of the coral into a soup which the starfish slurps up. It then retracts its stomach and moves on, leaving a bleached (i.e. dead) patch of coral skeleton. A medium sized starfish can consume up to 6 square meters (65 sq ft) of living coral reef per year. If times are lean the starfish can go for months (or longer) without eating. http://www.arkive.org/crown-of-thorns-starfish/acanthaster-planci/video-00.html Crown-of-thorns starfish are male or female and they do not reproduce by budding, but female starfish lay from 6.5 million to 14 million eggs each per breeding season [hereupon the author wiped his furrowed brow]. When the eggs hatch there are several interesting larval stages which the echinoderm goes through before reaching their adult form. Suffice to say, the starfish reaches sexual maturity after 2 years and it lives as long as 8 years. Fourteen million offspring per season is a lot! If predators do not keep the crow-of-thorns starfish in check, they can swiftly overrun entire reef systems and eat all the coral into bleached uninhabitable wasteland. This leaves all of the multitudinous reef inhabitants homeless. The reef skeletons dissolve in our newly acidified oceans and one of earth’s most diverse ecosystems becomes a weed-strewn graveyard. The starfish are hard to stop since they are provided with tremendous defenses: each animal is covered with 1-5 centimeter long razor sharp spines which in turn are covered with toxic saponins—soaplike chemicals which interact with cholesterols to tear holes in cell membranes. The starfish can regenerate arms. If removed from the water, the starfish develops holes in its body and loses its water, but it can swiftly reconstitute itself if placed back in the ocean.
Crown-of-thorns starfish wash up in Japan (BBC)
Fortunately there are some tough predators of the crown-of-thorns starfish. Certain triggerfish, parrotfish, and blowfish can insouciantly crunch through the spines with hardened mouths. Painted shrimp and polychaete worms can tear off and eat pieces of the starfish until the latter dies (whereupon the impatient scavengers devour the corpse). Best of all, the magnificent Triton’s trumpet, a huge gastropod mollusk, can rasp the odious starfish to pieces with its sharpened radula and suck up the offending echinoderm! Unfortunately, the fish are vanishing into the aquarium trade or the soup pot and the tritons have been killed en masse so their shells can be sold to tourists. This results in a feedback loop wherein the crown-of-thorns devastate a reef to the extent that the predators can not survive at all. The plague of starfish then descend of virgin reefs and kill them off too.
A plague of crown-of-thorns starfish (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Healthy reefs have a certain ability to fight off the crown-of-thorns star, but today’s reefs are coping with overfishing, invasive creatures, acidification, pollution, and fluctuating temperatures. The crow-of-thorns is exploting these weaknesses (and the diminished stock of its predators) to run rampant. Humans have stepped in late to try to kill of the rampaging multi-armed villains, but, for all of our skill at doing in other organisms, we seem to not be very good at killing these fiendish starfish. They are difficult to rip apart. They are hard to net or trap. They are surprisingly resistant to punctures. Recently divers have had success suppressing infestations by injecting the starfish all individually with sodium bisulphate (which echinoderms and my great uncle cannot abide, but which is relatively harmless to most other lifeforms). Obviously this is an expensive and labor intensive solution (although if somebody wanted to hire me as a starfish bounty killer, I would not decline).
New frontiers of pest control (via DIVE QUEENSLAND)
The common name of the crown-of-thorns starfish is a reference to Christian mythology. One of the tortures endured by Jesus was a crown woven of thorns (which pierced his temple and hurt him while simultaneously mocking his alleged crime—pretending to the throne of Judaea). Throughout Christian art, the crown of thorns is the supreme crown of the king of kings which he wears during the passion or as he harrows the underworld. The voracious starfish earned its sobriquet not by godliness, but by looking like a horrible alien crown made of thorns (and arguably also by bringing death and devastation to coral reefs). I find it to be one of the most poetic and horrifying common names in all of taxonomy—and as the starfish destroys ecosystem after ecosystem, it seems fully earned.
A giant triton snail feeding on crown-of-thorns starfish. Image supplied by Australian Institute of Marine Science
Earth's Most Endangered Parrot, the Kakapo
Sigh, well, it is Earth Day again. I love this planet with its nitrogen skies, mighty oceans, super volcanoes, araucaria forests, and self-inflating parrots–to name a smattering of Earth’s numberless glories. However this particular holiday always vexes me. From the egregious murderer who claims to have co-invented it (and acted as MC at the countercultural first Earth Day in 1970), to the oodles of smug, media-friendly pseudo advice, to the “greenwash” which huge companies churn out to appear ecologically sensitive, the whole earth day movement seems a parody of humanity’s excess and hypocrisy rather than a real attempt to curb the same.
Nevertheless (if any readers are still with me) I have an earnest Earth Day post in the form of an apology to the poor dead whale whose garbage-filled carcass drifted up onto a Seattle beach two days ago. The 37 foot long gray whale had 50 gallons of sludge in his stomach including plastic garbage like six-pack rings, sweat pants, and grocery bags. The whale was not killed by the waste in his system, but he was stressed, emaciated, alone, and had gashes on his head from being struck by boat propellers.
I’m a plastics manufacturer, a capitalist, and a consumer (although I am only really successful at consuming) and I feel like this is probably my fault as much as it is anyone’s. I import vinyl China-goods from across the Pacific on container ships and ship them across the continent via petrol truck. Additionally, I purchase all sorts of plastic things and trade goods from overseas. I’m a carnivore who eats from factory farms. It goes without saying that I eat as many anchovies, squid, crab and tasty sea creatures as I can fit in my stomach. Likewise, I gorge myself on out-of-season fruits and vegetables (which must be shipped). I like America’s big crazy military and I’m a technophile to boot. I think that the solutions to our problems can only be found through learning more and building better stuff.
Can I defend these positions? Yes: although I cast them in a stark light in that last paragraph, I think they are defensible and mostly logical—probably the best positions currently available given global realities. Furthermore, reader, even if you say you are eco-friendly, your own actual positions are probably fairly similar: you may not like the military or own a toy company but you pay taxes and buy plastic junk. [I exempt vegetarians—you guys really are different and I rather admire you for it.]
But are my life and my outlook a problem for the earth’s ecosystem? Yes, I think so. We are eating the oceans empty and filling them with rubbish. Frogs are dying off worldwide and crazy blights are everywhere killing bats and trees and bees (and whales). Clearly something is wrong.
I am sorry, whale, for your death. Like all good hearted people, I love cetaceans and it makes me sad that you are gone. I accept my blame. But I like people too: how many of our teaming billions must go unfed or unemployed if we really try to reign in capitalism? How much will it truly help the whales (and the wee shrimpkins on which they feed) to be a locavore or wear a hemp mumu or create layer after layer of eco authority? I don’t know, and I don’t believe the people who claim to know. From now on, I’ll try harder to find out which ideas are workable solutions to our environmental ills and distinguish them from those which are only more subtle forms of greenwash.
Gray Whales are curious about people.
ferrebeekeeper 
