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Something which fascinates me is when a very successful species is so successful that it evolves away from its original habitat into a new niche. Examples of this literally make up the history of life on the planet, but today I want to talk about one of my favorite families of fish, Balistidae, the triggerfish, the cunning, clever, and truculent nast5ers of the coral reef environment. Except today we are writing about a triggerfish which left the colorful, frenetic cities of the coral reef and evolved to live in the vast open ocean. This is Canthidermis maculata aka “the spotted oceanic triggerfish”, a medium-sized triggerfish which has a worldwide distribution in temperate oceans from New York to London, down around the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Thailand. It can be found in the Pacific Ocean from Japan across to Hawaii and to the California and South American coasts.
The fish are silver or gray with little pale dots of blue or white. Although they can grow to half a meter (20 inches) in length, adults are more commonly 35 centimeters (14 inches) long. Reef triggerfish are opportunistic feeders and so, it seems are spotted oceanic triggerfish which can be carnivorous or planktivorous depending on the circumstances (although they seem to specialize in hunting smaller fish).
Like many pelagic fish (but unlike most other triggerfish) these fish seem to assemble in loose schools to travel the oceans. they are preyed on by sailfish, mahi-mahi, large sea birds, and other such predators (and by rapacious humans, of course). Female triggerfish build their nests in rough proximity on ocean bottoms from 4 meters to 45 meters deep where they guard and aerate the eggs (which hatch very quickly and disseminate the little larval fish throughout the oceans.
Worldwide there are about 17,000 species of bees…and most of them seem to be is some sort of trouble. However it is not easy to keep track of 17,000 anythings…much less 17,000 species of small flying insects. So the plight of all bees is not clearly understood (even if we have shocking anecdotes of how poorly some individual bee species are doing). To remedy our ignorance of the bigger picture, a group of apiculturists, hymenopterists, ecologists, data scientists, and biology-minded cartologists collaborated to create a worldwide bee map.
Assembled from piecing together millions of individual data points, The bee map is a god’s eye overview of how bees are doing across the entire planet. Just glancing at it reveals some strange patterns about our little flying friends. Unlike most animals, bees are more numerous and various in temperate and arid habitats than in tropical forests. I wonder if this is because tropical forests do not offer the sheer acreage of uncontested flowers that prairies, croplands, & blooming scrublands do, or if it because nobody is marking down data points about tiny flying (and stinging) insects in the middle of the trackless Amazon. Perhaps as the bee map evolves into greater complexity and thoroughness we will have a definitive answer to that question.
The bee map should also help us to track the results of habitat loss and climate change on bee populations (and distinguish the impact of such vectors from natural bee predilections/behaviors). Dr John Ascher of the National University of Singapore expresses this point with greater clarity: “By establishing a more reliable baseline we can more precisely characterize bee declines and better distinguish areas less suitable for bees from areas where bees should thrive but have been reduced by threats such as pesticides, loss of natural habitat, and overgrazing.”
I hope the bee map fulfills its purpose and helps nature’s hard-working pollinators and flying fieldhands to worldwide recovery. But beyond that wish, I am excited to see more visual representations of vast ecological datasets. Big data had such promise…but so far it seemingly has mostly been used for targeted marketing, tearing apart democracy, and crafting esoteric financial schemes. Sigh… Let’s have more thoughtful use of the tools that technology gives us to solve actual important problems.
To celebrate the beginning of the twenties, Ferrebeekeeper featured a wish-list article which requested (1) democratic reforms, and (2) more money for scientific research. Today we are following up on the second part of that post with a somewhat dispiriting report from the boringly named National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (a federal statistical agency within the National Science Foundation). As you might imagine, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics has compiled a list of statistics concerning the state of science and engineering in the USA (it is their mission to present such a report to Congress every two years).
The report concentrates on 2017, when the United States spent $548 billion on research and development–more than any other nation! However the report also analyzes larger R&D trends among all nations over time–which makes our relative decline more apparent. In 2000, nearly 40% of the worldwide R&D budget was spent here in America. By 2017, the total world R&D budget was 2 trillion dollars, which means the American share is down to (approximately) 25%.
You would probably guess that a lot of the new worldwide R&D budget is Chinese, and that is correct. The report’s authors speculate that by 2019 (which was too recent for the statisticians to have comprehensive numbers) the Chinese R&D budget actually surpassed the American research budget. I guess we will see. China tends to spend more money on applied research, whereas we are still world leaders in blue-sky research, but they are catching up everywhere.
More and more national wealth is being pointlessly hoarded by robber barons. Do these plutocrats imagine they will live forever? Why not spend their ill-gotten lucre on developing robot workers, immortality potions, and alligator soldiers to guard them against popular insurrection? Even if the prospect of astonishing & miraculous innovations don’t beguile the Davos class, you would think the prospect of Chinese supremacy in tomorrow’s marketplace and battlefield would get them to spend more money on the lab. In the lack of business/private leadership (which, frankly, hasn’t been leading America to anywhere other than the underworld anyway) the solution is obvious. Write to your elected officials and demand more money go to scientific research. The future is on the line (and I wouldn’t mind some immortality potions and omniscient robot servants, even if the 1% don’t care for such things).
The stories of the Crommyonian sow and the Caledonian Boar have made me reflect on what intense life-forms pigs are. I admire pigs–and not just because I love to eat them. Uncooked and on the hoof, the pig is amazing…and also alarming. The familiar Eurasian swine has two manifestations: domesticated (Sus scrofa domestica) and wild (Sus scrofa). The former is big and pink and tailor crafted by human to be easily controlled and scrumptious on the table. However, domestic pigs keep the smarts of their wild kin. They are the cleverest creature in the barnyard except for the farmer (usually) and that’s saying something considering how cunning goats are. Thanks to their intelligence and their strength, farm pigs sometimes get away from us. Within only a few generations, domestic pigs return to their wild type—bristly, furtive, and angry. There are feral pigs just about everywhere humankind has been except for the frigid polar regions. The creatures spread across the entire Pacific Ocean on the canoes of intrepid sea-farers and on isolated islands they have sometimes outlasted their hearty tenders: even in the modern world there are islands with pigs but no humans.
- Domestic Pig
As invaders, feral pigs are immensely successful. They flourish in Australia, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and on innumerable islands. Swine are omnivorous grazers. Their tremendous sense of smell, along with their strength, smarts, and speed, allows them to run roughshod over unprepared ecosystems.
Pigs are fecund, breeding quickly and having large litters. As social animals, pigs communicate via grunts, squeals, and snuffles. A “sounder” of wild pigs is therefore quite adept at avoiding predators and capitalizing food resources. Such groups of wild pigs are controlled by one or two big dominant sows (males are either solitary or form small bachelor groups). Woe upon anyone who backs a wild or feral pig into a corner. The animals have substantial mass, a low center of gravity, powerful tusks, and a bellicose desire not to be eaten. Even domestic pigs can be dangerous. To quote Wikipedia, “pigs can be aggressive and pig-induced injuries are relatively common in areas where pigs are reared or where they form part of the wild or feral fauna.”
So never ever do this with feral pigs you don't know well!
There are well-known taboos against eating pigs in many cultures and religions. Some groups feel they are dirty–and indeed swine are strangely similar to people and can bring a host of pathogens and parasites to someone who handles pork carelessly or lives to close to a pigsty. These similarities have also given pigs a large role as laboratory animals, and when we get easily replaceable artificial organs they may come from transgenic pigs (the super intelligent “pigoons” from Atwood’s Oryx & Crake were among the scarier creatures of contemporary science fiction). Brushing those ideas aside, modern agriculture has excelled at producing safe pork. Nearly 100 million tons of pork was consumed worldwide in 2009 (over half of this by people in China).
That’s a lot of pig butchering! But to reiterate the point of this post, being delicious has brought success to the pig. There are over 2 billion pigs worldwide, making the animal one of the most successful large mammals on the planet. Pigs can get away from our farms and go feral. It’s a rare occurrence, but it happens often enough that there will always be wild pigs as long as there are people. No matter how many pigs we eat, they will always be successful organisms maintaining a massive cloven footprint on the earth.
A pig (Sus scrofa domestica) swimming in the Bahamas. (Photography by Eric Cheng)
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