Lord of the Flies

Some fun facts (or factoids?) about the space rock we currently inhabit. From Wikipedia, I believe.

>>>Insects are the most diverse group of animals; they include more than a million described species and represent more than half of all known living organisms. The total number of extant species is estimated at between six and ten million; potentially over 90% of the animal life forms on Earth are insects. 

>>>Insects may be found in nearly all environments, although only a small number of species reside in the oceans, which are dominated by another arthropod group, crustaceans, which recent research has indicated insects are nested within.

>>>In 1982, Terry Erwin published an estimate of global species richness of 30 million, by extrapolating from the numbers of beetles found in a species of tropical tree. In one species of tree, Erwin identified 1,200 beetle species, of which he estimated 163 were found only in that type of tree. Given the 50,000 described tropical tree species, Erwin suggested that there are almost 10 million beetle species in the tropics. 

>>>In 2011 a study published in PLoS Biology estimated there to be 8.7 million ± 1.3 million eukaryotic species on Earth. A 2016 study concludes that Earth is home to 1 trillion species.

The good news is that most of that trillion aren´t insects. The bad news is that they are...micro-organisms! Either way, we live on Bug Planet. And God is the Lord of flies.

Lovecraft´s Lucia

 

- You *do* know that we are evolutionary cousins, right?
- Nah, I´m a special creation. God loves beetles! 

Just watched a rather boring French docu about the evolution (or is it EVIL-ution) of insects. Apparently, Lucia (or LUCIA = Last Universal Common Insect Ancestor) was a crustacean which crawled out of the ocean...and the rest is history. Hundreds of millions of years of history, to be exact. 

No surprise there. I mean, the idea that fleas, locusts and termites (or the praying mantis!) are ultimately derived from a primordial cousin to crayfish and crabs does make a certain intuitive sense. They are equally eerie and unsettling. Like some stuff straight out of Lovecraft.

Although I have to say that arachnids are even worse. Where did *they* come from, I wonder? Color out of space?  

    

Things are getting cray cray

The Nationalnyckeln project slowly moves forward, and who knows, at this pace maybe they will reach their declared goal around the year 3000 or so. The goal being to publish books covering all (!) extant species of multi-cellular organisms found in Sweden. The latest volume, hot off the presses, is titled "Nationalnyckeln: Kräftdjur - tiofotade kräftdjur. Crustacea: Euphausiacea - Decapoda". Yepp, things are going to get cray cray! 

In somewhat plainer English, the book covers two groups of crustaceans: the krill and the decapods. The latter group includes shrimps, crabs, hermit crabs, crayfish, lobsters and God (or is it the other guy) knows what else. I always wax philosophical when leafing through works of this kind. The idea that an indifferent cosmos just tugging along gave rise to sinister-looking creatures like decapods is frankly scarier than the Gnostic take that of course the Devil did it.

We get to meet some old favorites, too. I mean, I can´t be the only person around here who actually *ate* some of this creatures. From my childhood, I remember panicky news broadcasts about the signal crayfish destroying the last remaining populations of European crayfish in Swedish lakes. The European species had already been severly decimated by a disease known as the crayfish plague. Introducing the American signal crayfish (which is resistant to the disease) was originally seen as the salvation of the Swedish crayfish industry (and, I suppose, one of our hallowed summer holiday traditions). Unfortunately, it turned out that the signal crayfish was a vector of the plague - precisely because it´s immune to it. The end result was an almost complete collapse of the remaining European crayfish population! Maybe just as good that I gave up eating crayfish long ago.

As usual, I learned a few new things from this book. For instance, I had no idea that there is actually a European lobster found in Swedish waters (but then, I never really reflected on the exact provenance of my lobster sauce). Or that the claws of the decapods are actually legs?! Or rather legs that adapted to a somewhat different function entirely.

But mostly, I felt ontological dread looking at the full color pictures of bizarre crab-like creatures from the oceanic depths you never knew existed in the first place, realizing that the first representatives of still extant decapod groups evolved over 200 million years ago. Our culinary problems with IAS crayfish are just a blip in the cosmic ocean! And perhaps even a bit cray cray... 

Well, actually

 

AI´s fantasy picture of a basking shark 

"Sveriges hav - Nordsjöns giganter" is a somewhat peculiar nature documentary, probably German in provenance, but I haven´t been able to locate the original version. The Swedish title means "The Seas of Sweden - Giants of the North Sea".

Ahem, the North Sea is *not* Swedish...

Indeed, most of the docu seems to be taped on or around the Shetland Islands, which are (of course) British?! Not sure who came up with the idea to call this a "Swedish" documentary. Some old Viking romantic? Dude!

But sure, if you like dramatic vistas, this might be for you. Killer whales, basking sharks, grey seals, sea otters, dolphins, skuas attacking and eating puffins, the invasive red king crab...you get the picture. Shetland sure looks pretty dangerous, LOL. 

  

Damn vegetarians

 

I haven´t double-checked anything. Think twice before sharing. LOL! 

Controversial clades

 

This one might be a bit confusing, tbh. But there you go!

The rock lobster is our strength

 

This must be the most original coat of arms in the world. The tiny island of Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory in the south Atlantic, adopted it in 2002. 

Note the bizarre supporters: two Tristan rock lobsters! Or perhaps St Paul rock lobsters - apparently scientists now believe that the Tristan variety isn´t a separate species, after all. 

The heraldic significance of the poor lobster haven´t saved it from apparently being the island´s most significant export product (for human consumption, obviously). 

Our faith in the rock lobster is our strength.  

Called it

I know this is highly subjective, but I´m beginning to like cladistics. You know, that annoying shit which has created havoc in the evolutionary tree we all learned in senior high science class circa 1985. With some help, I might add, from the phylogenetic species concept (still don´t like that one) and the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy of birds (which does make sense). 

I always suspected that starlings were really a kind of petty crows, and yepp, you guessed it, Sibley and my man Jon did prove that sturnids and corvids should really be treated as the same family. Indeed, if Anatomically Modern Man disappears, the next intelligent (and highly destructive) ruler of this space rock will probably be...Sturnus vulgaris, hell bent on a campaign of extermination against crows, gulls and, I suppose, anatomically less modern men. Of course it´s a bloody corvid. 

As for cladistix, one clade that certainly makes sense is the Eufalconimorphae, within which falcons are grouped with passerines and parrots, meaning (of course) that falcons are *not* closely related to hawks, eagles or the highly aberrant stork known as "California condor". No surprise there, I always thought falcons looked more similar to said parrots, rather than to raptors of the diurnal persuasion. 

Now, it has come to my quality attention that some prominent cladisticians have proposed the existence of a *huge* clade known as Pancrustacea, regrouping both insects and crustaceans. Bingo! All my life, I wondered about the sinister similarity between the half-dead crayfish at my parents´ dinner table and the Insecta in our backyard, now I know the reason why, thank you. 

I have stopped worrying, and learned how to love cladograms. Yeah, really. 

Hell´s Bells

"Mysterious Planet: Giants of the Carribean" is a spectacular but also somewhat confusing documentary about...essentially everything at the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and its oceanic vicinity. Ostensibly, though, it´s about whale sharks! And yes, the sharks are in there somewhere. 

The narrator moves back and forth between the jungle, the water-filled underground caves, and the open sea, just as freely as he crosses millions of years of deep time. It´s not always clear whether what we see is real footage, or the special effects department working overtime. But yes, "Giants of the Carribean" *is* fascinating. 

As late as two years ago, marine biologists were stunned to discover a huge annual gathering of whale sharks off the Yucatan coast, in an area seemingly devoid of plankton (their staple food). What on earth were they doing there? Apparently, there *is* a lot of plankton in the area, after all, specifically the roe of bonito tunafish. Meanwhile, other scientists are exploring the underground "rivers" in the Yucatan jungles, which may even have inspired ancient Mayan mythology about a dangerous subterranean realm of demons and spirits. The flooded caves turn out to have a connection to the Caribbean Sea! Fortunately or otherwise, the only "monsters" in the caves are peculiar shrimps, fishes and (above water level) bats and snakes. There are also mysterious bacterial formations nicknamed "Hell´s Bells". Apparently, the bacteria need neither sun light nor oxygen to propagate. (Life on Mars discovered?) 

The sink holes (known as cenotes) in the ex-Mayan jungle turn out to be the last remnants of the large crater that killed the dinosaurs (and a lot of other creatures) at the end of the Cretaceous. One of the organisms killed off in this spectacular Velikovskian manner was a fish even larger than the whale shark. At the time, the ancestors of the whale sharks were small fish living at the bottom of the ocean. And so it goes, around and around, in this crazy world (perhaps ruled by some demonic entity appeased by the Maya, but that´s literally another show!). 

Hell´s Bells indeed. 

My arachnophobia just got worse

Another link to Karl Shuker´s crypto-zoology website, this time about supposed observations of giant spiders. And I do mean huge - the size of a dinner plate, a chihuahua or...even larger.

Of course, we all "know" that such creatures are impossible in Earth´s present atmosphere, since spiders (and insects) breath through trachea, which imposes absolute physiological limitations on their size. 

OR SO WE ASSUMED UNTIL KARL SHUKER DID MORE RESEARCH ON THE MATTER!!!

It turns out that one oversized arthropod, the coconut crab (a crustacean) has evolved a novel organ for breathing, since it lives exclusively on land. 

So why not spiders?

My arachnophobia just got worse. Let´s hope all the reports detailed in the linked blog post below are drunken tall tales or misidentified frying pans, chihuahuas or coconut crabs... 

Giant spiders: monstrous myth or simply mayhem?

Shrimps aren't kosher

"Hyperiid Amphipods (Amphipoda, Hyperiidoea) of the World Oceans" is a voluminous work by Vinogradov, Volkov and Semenova, the super-trio of Soviet amphipod research.

Don't worry, amphipods are not some kind of semi-amphibious secret weapon of the KGB. No, it's a particularly disgusting kind of small crustaceans found in all the world's oceans. They look like diminutive shrimps, so something tells me these critters aren't kosher.

The scientific editor of this English-language version is Douglas Siegel-Causey. He reveals in a preface that the American edition isn't a straightforward translation of the Russian original, but an emended and corrected edition.

The species descriptions are extremely long, with heavy emphasis on identification. This is not a book for the layman, but a scientific reference work. Since hyperiid amphipods aren't one of my staple foods (despite being a Gentile), I'm not sure how to rate it, so I'll just give it three stars.

Made in Poland

This is the first volume of "Atlas of the Marine Fauna of Southern Spitsbergen". I've only seen the second volume of this obviously very obscure work. Small wonder. The atlas is Polish, and the text is in both Polish, Russian and English! The second volume deals with crustaceans (many of them bizarre) and molluscs. What this volume covers, I honestly don't know. Seabirds?