Take Your Kids to the Beach

Take Your Kids to the Beach

In recent weeks, beach-goers from Santa Barbara to San Diego have discovered over 1,000 dead and dying sea lion pups on the beach. Apparently undernourished from birth, these pups did not put on enough blubber from mother’s milk, and once weaned, failed to find enough to eat on their own.

Without an adequate layer of blubber, sea lions cannot maintain the body temperature that a warm blooded mammal needs to survive in the cold water, so they come up on the beach to sun themselves, and warm up. Unfortunately they don’t find anything to eat on the beach either, and eventually they expire from starvation.

Wildlife rescuers in Southern CA have been overwhelmed with calls about these poor pups, but there’s little they can do. No one has the facilities to care for hundreds of starving sea lion pups. Everyone equipped to handle sea lions, has their hands full right now. Sometimes they relocate the pups to more secluded beaches, in hopes that they will find more food. Sometimes they euthanize the animals.

Last year, persistent readers will recall, I wrote about starving pelicans here on the Northern CA coast. Pelicans and sea lions both eat fish, or at least they would, if they could find them. These deaths are not the result of some exotic new disease spreading through the ecosystem. These deaths indicate a precipitous drop in the ocean’s fecundity. It’s a very bad sign. I don’t want to call it a “wake-up call”, because so many so called “wake-up calls” have gone unheeded, so I’ll simply call it another ghastly, heartbreaking consequence of deliberate human indifference to the natural world.

At least people see them. People should have to see this kind of thing. Take your kids to the beach. Show them a dying sea lion pup, starving to death on the sand. Explain to them that because we’ve replaced most of the phytoplankton in the ocean with pulverized plastic from soda bottles, shrink wrap, plastic bags, toys, medical equipment, electronic gadgets, car parts etc etc, the ocean can’t provide enough oxygen or food to support as much life as it did fifty years ago, or even ten years ago.

Remember that famous scene in The Graduate, where the older businessman whispers to Dustin Hoffman one word of advice for his future? “Plastics”, he says. Around the same time Andy Warhol predicted “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. With the ubiquity of plastic today, it’s hard to remember a time when soda came in returnable, not recyclable, glass bottles, when they made car bumpers out of chrome plated steel instead of easily shattered plastic, and when electronic devices had metal or wood cabinets, and lasted for decades.

Fifty years later, an island the size of Texas, newly recognized by the United Nations as “Garbage Island”, composed almost entirely of plastic, has formed in the Pacific Ocean. Today, plastic has its own homeland, and it grows every day. Every day, tons of plastic debris finds its way into the Pacific Ocean to make the pilgrimage to Garbage Island. Over the course of decades, endless churning, salt water and sunlight slowly pulverize it into microscopic bits.

These microscopic bits of inorganic, non-biodegradable plastic absorb sunlight, preventing it from penetrating the ocean’s depths and choke off phytoplankton, the foundation of the ocean food chain, and the source of most of the world’s atmospheric oxygen. In less than half a century, about half of all the phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean has been replaced by these microscopic bits of plastic.

Oddly, considering how long plastic lasts, plastic has become the foundation of our disposable economy. Almost nothing lasts longer than plastic, and almost nothing can digest it. Yet, we produce billions of one-time-use products from it, every year. When burned, plastic produces deadly bio-accumulative carcinogenic poison, in landfills it lasts almost forever, and in the ocean, it gets ground into fine floating particles that choke out life.

No, it’s not a wake-up call. It’s too late for that. Go to the beach. Look those pups in the eye as they die of starvation, and explain to your children what has happened in your lifetime. Tell your kids that fifty years ago, they would have seen thousands of healthy sea lions, as well as seals and otters, and that there was plenty of fish for all of them to eat. Tell them that for every bird they see, there were once twenty or forty, but that they all died so that you could live a high-consumption, middle-class fantasy, and now, even that fantasy is dying.

On the Money; Foie Gras

 

On The Money;

Economics For the 99%

Foie Gras

Edit

 

Despite their fat books, and complex economic models, economists fail to comprehend the nature of economic activity. They don’t realize that the economy is an organic part of a greater organism known as society, and an even greater organism known as the environment. In other words, the economy is not a thing in itself. Instead, it is a part of our lives, and our lives are part of life on Earth. Ideally, the economy should be a much smaller part of our lives, and much less of a burden to life on Earth.

 

 

To illustrate this relationship, you could think of the economy as the liver of a goose. The liver of a healthy goose is about the size of a human thumb, and at that size it serves the goose very well. In a healthy goose, this small organ helps the goose digest and process all of the seeds, plant material, bugs and small fish that a healthy goose eats, and turns that food into strong goose muscles, shiny warm goose feathers, healthy goose eggs, and gives the goose all of the energy that it needs to fly thousands of miles each year as part of its annual migration. That’s what a goose’s liver is supposed to do.

 

 

However, some people who raise captive geese, don’t care about the health of their geese. They don’t want their geese to fly, or lay eggs, and they don’t care if the goose is strong or if it has shiny warm feathers. Instead, they want their geese to grow the biggest liver possible, in order that they might dine upon a French delicacy known as Foie Gras.

 

 

They’ve learned that if they nail the goose’s feet to the floor, so that it can’t get any exercise, and they put a tube down the goose’s throat, so that they can force feed it huge quantities of leftover pasta, bacon grease, and lots of other fatty, high carbohydrate food, they can make the goose’s liver grow until it is larger than a human fist. So, this is what they do to their geese.

 

 

As you can imagine, this doesn’t make the goose very happy at all. The goose shows many signs of distress, but the people who raise geese this way, simply ignore those signs. The goose then becomes very ill, but the people who raise geese this way ignore that too. Instead of the liver serving the needs of a healthy goose, the people who raise geese for foie gras, sacrifice the goose in order to produce the largest liver possible.

 

 

Before long, the goose is near death, and the goose’s liver, by this time about eight times as large as a healthy liver, has become so distended and diseased that it barely functions at all. At this point, the people who raise geese for foie gras, kill the goose, and remove the huge diseased organ, for which they have sacrificed what was once a beautiful, healthy bird. This is the ugly truth behind that popular French delicacy.

 

 

Unfortunately, this is also the ugly truth behind economics. For far too long, a small number of people who enjoy “the finer things in life”, have eagerly sacrificed the health of society and the environment in order to force economic expansion. For them, the quality of our lives, our health, our strength, and our culture only exist to deliver to them, the largest possible economy, so that they might enjoy the largest quantity of the richest possible delicacy.

 

 

Do not be fooled by fat books, sharp suits or white lab coats. Economists, businessmen and scientists generally do not have your best interest at heart. Instead, they seek to preserve, and improve their positions of authority and privilege, while they serve the interests of the 1%. Unless we overthrow the tyranny of objective science, escape the clutches of the 1%, and remember how to live our own lives, despite our fallibility, our goose is cooked. There’s an economic analogy that’s On The Money.

 

 

How to Tell if This New Drug is Right for You

How to Tell if This New Drug is Right for You

With the huge, and growing, variety of new drugs available today, you can’t possibly try them all. Information about drugs, always impenetrably technical, and mostly written in impossibly small type, dissuade most drug users from even trying to learn anything about the drugs they take, beyond the street name. So, how can you tell if a new drug is right for you?

 

Nearly everyone takes drugs of some kind, at least at times, and for many, drugs form a regular part of our daily routine. This is nothing new. You could argue, as I have in the past, that civilization itself, began as a dysfunctional adjustment to support an alcoholic lifestyle, that took hold some 10,000 years ago. Indigenous hunter/gatherer cultures have used hallucinogenic plants and other plant medicines ceremonially for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. Even animals, from songbirds to elephants imbibe from time to time, and some, like the koala, have cultivated their addictions for so long that evolution has shaped their bodies to accommodate their habits.

 

Economically, in the US alone, the pharmaceutical drug industry accounts for trillions of dollars in business activity annually, and forms a large portion of US GDP. Despite generally terrific profit margins, the pharmaceutical industry enjoys huge government subsidies as well. Yet, despite downturns in the rest of the economy, and growing government debt, drug use, drug profits, and drug subsidies continue to grow at an alarming rate.

 

Paradoxically, we, as people, continue to get sicker and poorer. We cannot lay this epidemic of disease completely at the feet of the pharmaceutical industry. Other factors, like an environment increasingly polluted with persistent toxins, poor diet, dangerous food additives, and long hours at stressful, yet sedentary, jobs all contribute to our general poor health. However, the drug industry itself contributes greatly to the proliferation of disease in our modern society.

 

A single drug can have many dangerous side effects, which often trigger new and serious health conditions. The explosion of new drugs has created an exponential growth in side effects, and with them a host of new conditions, which in turn, require more medication. Toxic pollution, generated in the production of drugs, cause disease in humans as well as in the animal kingdom. Disposal of drugs, usually in the urine of drug users, take their toll on human health and aquatic wildlife as they inevitably find their way into our nations waterways and water supplies. Addiction and overdose only add to legacy of disease that we can attribute to our remarkably vibrant Health-Care industrial complex.

 

No amount of spending, public or otherwise, no amount of new drugs, and no number of new doctors will solve this looming crisis. You might find this fact very depressing, and it might make you anxious about the future. If so, the drug industry has many drugs specifically formulated to treat those conditions. Still, how do you know if a new drug is right for you?

 

Here, I offer few general guidelines that I, a layperson, use to determine if a new drug is right for me:

 

1. If I see a commercial on TV that includes the words, “Ask your Doctor if…is right for you.”, I assume that drug sucks. I assume that if a company has to advertize their drug on TV, it must be a waste of money, like everything else I see advertized on TV.

2. On the other hand, if I read a headline like: “Nude Man Who Hijacked City Bus and Crashed Into Downtown Restaurant, Claims He Was Under the Influence of New Drug” I will probably try that drug.

3. If I see the name of a drug on anything in a doctors office, like the pen he writes with, the pad of paper he writes on, the lanyard around his neck holding his ID, anatomical models, lamps, tissue boxes, drapes, posters, etc., I will definitely not ask for any of those drugs. If a doctor does recommend a drug, any drug, I always ask if he has any free samples on hand, and if he can recommend a generic alternative.

4. But, if I see someone babbling incoherently, while writhing in a puddle of their own vomit, I will definitely ask around to find out what drug they took, and probably try some myself.

5. Finally, if a beautiful young woman asks me if I have a particular drug, I will do everything I can to find that drug immediately.

 

Of course, these are only general guidelines that reflect my own personal predilections, but they are informed by this statistical fact: You are significantly more likely to die of an overdose from a prescription drug your doctor recommended, than you are from a recreational drug you bought from a street dealer.

On The Money; A New Game Piece in Monopoly

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

A New Game Piece in Monopoly

 

I heard recently that Milton-Bradley Corporation, makers of the ubiquitous board game Monopoly, has retired the iron. If you haven’t played Monopoly for a while, I’ll remind you that to start the game, each player chooses, from among a handful of miniature metal objects, one of them to represent them on the game-board.

The iron, never popular as a game piece, has finally retired. My mother retired her iron in the ’70s. I’ve certainly never owned one, and I’d have no idea how to use it if I did.. I’ll bet a lot of young people today wouldn’t even recognize an iron, or have any idea what it was used for.

In its place, M-B has introduced a new game piece, the cat, a brilliant move if you ask me. I love cats. I would much rather be a cat, than an iron, any day of the week. The cat might get chased around a bit by the Scotty dog, or get run over by the race car, but I think the cat will do well in the game of Monopoly, maybe a little too well.

The cat just might undermine the the entire premise of the game of Monopoly, and none too soon, frankly. Think about it. Can you imagine a cat ever paying rent? I can’t. If you’ve ever been to the real Atlantic City, you can’t help but notice that the closer you get to the Boardwalk, the more cats you see. I’ll bet not one of them pays rent.

Even though you’ll find hotels galore on the real Boardwalk, you’ll also notice dozens of cats, strutting up and down and under the Boardwalk, like they own the place, without a care in the world. I think they have the right attitude, and as newcomers to the game of Monopoly, that attitude just might save the cat, and us.

The game of Monopoly is an exercise in what economists call, “rent-seeking behavior”. In the game, you “buy” a “property”, say “Baltic Ave.” for instance. Then, when other players land on a “property” you “own”, they pay you “rent”. When you “own” all of the “properties” in a particular area, you can charge the unfortunate players that land there, higher “rent”. If you spend some more money on those “properties”, buying “houses” and “hotels” you raise the “rent” still further. You win the game, when other players no longer have enough “money” to pay the “rent” they owe.

In real life, rent-seeking behavior has become epidemic, and it represents a major shift in our economy. You can expect to see more rent-seeking-behavior as the economy shifts away from manufacturing and resource extraction, towards this more coercive and direct form of blood-sucking.

For generations in the past, capitalism must have seemed rather magical. Markets brimmed with consumer goods that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Fish from distant ocean fisheries, cheap redwood patio furniture, harvested from remote forest habitat, radios, toys, clothes and other products manufactured in distant lands, from materials mined in far-flung corners of the Earth, surely amazed the American consumer, eager to have them all. Most consumers didn’t see the devastation that capitalism left in it’s wake. They just saw a seemingly endless supply of shiny new things to buy.

In the future, our economy will look very different. Instead of a magical place where shiny new things appear out of nowhere, the economy will look like your landlord, and the sheriff’s deputy who comes to evict you. The economy will be breathing down your neck constantly, not letting you get too comfortable anywhere. Instead of extracting resources from distant lands, the economy will extract them from you. Even now, the economy looks, and feels more like the game of Monopoly, than it did to your parents generation, but the Baby Boomers really enjoy playing Monopoly, especially since they got a head start.

Because of their large numbers, the Baby Boomers already occupy a large portion of the available housing. Because they grew up at the very pinnacle of American consumerism, they have wildly unrealistic expectations for their lifestyle, and because they got into the housing market well before the housing bubble, they were well positioned to acquire “investment properties”, and hold on to them even as younger families lost their overpriced homes in the foreclosure crisis.

Since the Federal Government taxes the money they make from renting those investment properties, at the low “capital gains” rate, rather than as “earned income”, tax policy strongly encourages this kind of “rent-seeking behavior”. Think about this when you hear politicians talk about the “capital gains tax”. They’ll say that keeping the “capital gains tax” low, creates jobs. In reality, the low capital gains tax rate screws young working people out of their chance to own a home and drives rent prices up.

Isn’t it ironic that the Baby Boomers, who introduced terms like “crash-pad”, “hippie commune”, and “intentional community” into the general lexicon, have turned into some of the greediest landlords in the history of humanity. The Boomers like playing “Monopoly” with these “investment properties”, and they’ve read dozens of books about how to “win” at it. Even as wages stagnated through most of their working careers, many of them have done quite well for themselves by engaging in this kind of “rent seeking behavior”.

While they never stop congratulating themselves for the Civil-Rights Movement, the Boomers now harbor as much prejudice and hostility, based on income, as their bigoted, racist parents did, based on skin color. The Boomers especially despise the homeless, who conspicuously avoid paying rent. I’ve heard the same kind of derogatory slurs, and vile comments hurled at the poor and homeless from former hippies, as I heard from the bigoted, racist drunks my Grandparents hung with, about Blacks and Hispanics, 40 years ago.

Today’s large poor and homeless population remind them of just how badly they’ve failed as a generation, something they remain in deep denial about. They don’t want to face the fact that the problems in our society run far deeper than the superficial changes they’ve made to the status quo, and that many of those changes only exacerbated the real problems we face as a culture.

The Boomers also expect to finish their lives, enjoying the same kind of excessive consumption that characterized their youth and middle age, but having lived at the very pinnacle of American consumerism, they long ago outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet, and have been consuming your future ever since.

They really don’t want to face this fact. They can’t face this fact, and they can’t face life without their lattes, luxury cars and lots and lots of things to buy. So, they blame the poor and the young, victimizing them with their hostility, defensiveness and denial, as well as their excess.

The Boomers don’t understand, or care, why you don’t have the money, or why you don’t want to pay it to them. They know that the law, and market forces are on their side, and they intend to press their advantage. They won’t face the reality of their unsustainable lifestyle, so long as they can extract more from you. They intend to win this game of Monopoly, and they don’t care what’s left for you when they’re done.

In the future, rental properties will fall increasingly into the hands of the 1%, who will form large faceless property management companies to run them. They will hire thugs and creeps to manage these properties who will bully tenants, steal their belongings and skimp on needed repairs even more than the Boomers who own them now.

While the constitution guarantees privacy rights to home owners, tenants increasingly sign these rights away when they sign a rental agreement. As home ownership becomes less affordable, the terms of rental agreements will favor landlords even more. Rentals will become less secure, less private, and more expensive, as the 1% uses them to squeeze even more blood out of their tenants.

Enter, the cat. Cats play by their own rules. Cats hunt ferociously. Cats scavenge effectively. Cats beg endearingly. Cats hide invisibly and cats howl incessantly. Cats are inscrutable. Cats are unpredictable, and cats are the most effective killing machines nature ever unleashed on planet Earth.

Cats know how to get their way, but cats never pay rent. As a newcomer to this game, you don’t stand a chance if you play by their rules, but as a cat, you can strut up and down boardwalk like you own the place without a care in the world. Take what you need and stay out from under foot. There’s some Monopoly advice that’s On the Money.

Hello, My Name is Civilization, and I’m an Alcoholic

Hello, My Name is Civilization, and I’m an Alcoholic

 

OK, I’m going to squeeze an enormous idea into a short, not too boring essay. Try to hang with me on this. Civilization began with something called “the agricultural revolution”. That is, a fundamental shift from a hunting and gathering lifestyle, to a farming lifestyle. This farming lifestyle led to permanent settlements, which then grew into cities, and eventually, into the civilization we know today. The question is: Why did they do it?

 

To start, lets take a very long look at human history. According to fossil evidence, people just like us, have inhabited this planet for well over one million years. One million years ago, all humans lived in Africa, and all humans lived very much like the San Bushmen of the Calihari Desert live today.

 

The San are a “hunting and gathering” culture. They plant no crops. They tend no livestock. Instead, they hunt wild game and gather wild plants for food. They have no written language, but have a very rich oral tradition. Even though the San have been pushed into some of the most inhospitable land on the African continent, they only work about four hours a day to meet their daily needs. They rarely go hungry, and enjoy better nutrition and more food security than do the farming people who now surround them.

 

The San enjoy a lot of leisure time, which they spend telling stories, making music, dancing and playing games, among other things. They have a rich culture, and that culture contains over one million years of accumulated knowledge about how to live on planet Earth. That knowledge allows them to flourish in the middle of a desert, while the farming people around them, who have forcibly taken all of the good land, work long hours, suffer from poor nutrition, and often starve.

 

But one million years ago, there were no farming people. All humans lived a hunting and gathering lifestyle, not unlike the San. Over the course of the last one million years, hunting and gathering humans spread out over Asia and Europe, and eventually even Australia and the Americas. This spread of humanity happened at a glacial pace, but by about 40,000 years ago, damn near every place on Earth that would support human life, was, albeit sparsely, inhabited by humans. This slow spread of hunter-gatherer culture gave rise to the vast diversity of sustainable human cultures around the world, from the Inuit to the Yanomami.

 

40,000 years ago, humans lived all over the world, quite happily, as hunters and gatherers. I’m not saying that they didn’t have problems, or that they didn’t fight. They had problems, and they fought, but they didn’t destroy the planet. They didn’t overpopulate the planet. They didn’t overheat the planet, and they didn’t work 40-50 hours a week just to get by.

 

So, the question is: Why, among the thousands of indigenous cultures around the world, did just one particular culture in the Middle-East, reject the collective knowledge of a million years of culture, and begin farming?

 

Farming is a lot of work, and not much fun. Compared to hunting and picking berries, plowing a field with a rock tied to a stick must have seemed quite tedious. Why did they do it?

 

If you’ve got plenty of food, which fossil records tell us they did, why would you plant wheat and barley? Even more perplexing: Why would they sacrifice the habitat of the game animals and wild plants that had sustained them for eons, to clear fields for wheat and barley?

 

That is what happened, by the way. One particular culture in the Middle-East took up farming, even though they had plenty of food, and then proceeded to farm so aggressively and so passionately, that they completely destroyed their own habitat. They wiped out all of the game animals and wild plants that they had relied on since the beginning of time. What was their motivation? What madness possessed them? What did they get out of wheat and barley that was worth destroying the world for?

 

The answer of course is BEER. Think about it awhile. Many indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes drink fermented alcoholic beverages on occasion, usually following an abundant fruit harvest, but the founders of civilization, sought to make drunkenness a daily, rather than an annual event.

Addiction is a very powerful motivator.

Yes, all of civilization is a dysfunctional adjustment made to support an alcoholic lifestyle. Don’t you think its time that we faced the fact that we have a problem?

The Most Important Holiday Blog Post in the World

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for the abundance that I have enjoyed this past year, but I am aware that many in this world go without. Thanksgiving also harkens in the Christmas shopping season, and many of you will spend a lot of money on stupid gifts no one really wants or needs. This Thanksgiving, I’m asking my readers to cut me a slice of that pie by supporting this important cause.

The Most Important Holiday Blog Post in the World

 

With the holidays rapidly approaching, a lot of us will be looking for gifts for people we don’t really like that much. If you’ve managed to avoid them all year, a gift is the perfect way to say, “Even though I hate your guts, I really can’t afford to have you talking shit about me.” This Holiday season, I offer you the perfect gift for people who you’d like to think well of you, but whom you don’t really know or like well enough to actually get them anything.

For these special people, a gift card from Helper International tells the recipient that you care more about some random, anonymous kids than you do about them. Helper makes sure that your money only helps cute, happy looking, photogenic kids, and we use the money you donate to give them cute, photogenic animals.

Your chosen recipient will receive a card with a beautiful color photograph so packed with cuteness and “Awwww”, that they will hate themselves, for being pissed that you didn’t really get them anything. Really, isn’t that what giving is all about, the feelings it inspires?

Sure, its awfully expensive for a greeting card, but you and your recipient will both know, that the kid in the picture really got to keep that cute little animal, gave it a name, took care of it, and bonded with it emotionally, before his parents slaughtered it and served it for dinner. That’s the kind of emotional enigma that makes the holidays so special.

Here at Helper International, our mission is simple, we use your donations to give highly prolific, and nutritious, live snails, to exceptionally cute children. Then we photograph the happy kids with their snails, print the photos on gift cards and send the cards to your specified recipient. That’s all there is to it.

Does it help? Sure it does. It helps us unload a bunch of snails, and puts money in our pockets. I can’t think of a more important cause than that, can you? You, and your chosen recipient get to share that “awwww” moment during the holidays, and some kid gets a snail. It’s a win win win deal for everybody.

So, please, give them the most important gift you can give. Give the gift of Escargot this holiday season. Help Helper International make the snail shepherding dreams of adorable children everywhere a reality. Only you can make make this miracle happen. No child should ever be denied the this exquisite delicacy and every child should have the opportunity to get to know the delightful little creatures that produce it in abundance.

Send your generous donations to Helper International, P.O. Box 2301, Redway, CA 95560 and make checks payable to John Hardin.  You’ll be glad you did, and so will I.  Thank you, for you support!

Halloween Spider Spectacular

Halloween Spider Spectacular

 

I love spiders. I have hundreds of pictures of them. We have a lot spiders here in SoHum. They inhabit these woods and our home in great abundance and variety. I find them endlessly fascinating and very much enjoy their company. They make great subjects for photography. Unlike most wild animals, they tend to sit still, which makes the job a lot easier.

I have a lot of respect for spiders. They’ve “seen” a lot on this here rock. According to archeologists, spiders’ ancient ancestors were among the first sea animals to venture onto dry land, and they colonized it aggressively. 200 million years ago, 50 millions years before the first insects, flying or otherwise, most of the major spider families of modern times, had already achieved worldwide distribution.

God only knows what they ate for those first 50 million years or so, but clearly, spiders have remarkable survival skills. For 150 million years they have adapted to everything that nature has thrown at them, including us, and they continue to flourish. Even as we instigate cataclysmic changes in our environment, triggering a massive wave of extinction around the globe, perhaps including our own, spiders seem to mostly take it all in stride.

Those who call human beings the dominant species on the planet, should consider this: Spiders outnumber us, all together they outweigh us, and they will almost certainly outlast us. In their long history on this planet, the rise and fall of humanity will amount to nothing but a brief, insignificant memory to them, like a TV show that lasted only one season, or a long evening spent with a rude dinner companion.

In our unholy quest to transform all of creation to our own purposes, we have never found a way to exploit spiders for commercial purposes, nor have we ever successfully weaponized spiders. Despite their large numbers and close proximity, they don’t compete with us for anything. They carry on all around us, unnoticed, mostly unstudied, and completely undaunted, patiently awaiting the day when they will, inevitably, bury us in cobwebs like they did the dinosaurs, the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger.

I used the word “seen” in quotes earlier, because most spiders have very poor vision. Spiders gather most of their sensory information from the extremely sensitive hairs on their legs and bodies. These hairs can detect very subtle air movements and vibrations. Web spiders also “see” with their webs, using their legs to sense every ripple and wave that passes through it.

While most of the creatures in the animal kingdom now take stereoscopic vision for granted, most spiders have a very different, and much more rudimentary visual system. Most spiders have an array of eight or more somewhat directionally focused eyes. However, these tiny eyes, in most cases, probably don’t send enough information to produce a meaningful image. They can probably tell, for instance, that it is darker to their left, than to their right, but little more.

Because of this unusual visual system spider faces seem especially alien to us. I think this may have a lot to do with our attitude towards them. Even insects, with their single pair of large compound eyes, seem more like us, than spiders. While many people dislike annoying flies, few people fear them. On the other hand, spiders rarely annoy anyone, but many people fear them. While many flying insects actively seek us out and bite us, leaving painful, itchy welts, spiders only bite in self defense, and even then, only rarely.

A few spiders see very well, with stereoscopic vision, and use it to navigate their world, and hunt prey. Both wolf spiders and jumping spiders respond primarily to visual stimuli, and they both have especially large eyes, for spiders. Neither wolf spiders, nor jumping spiders content themselves to spin webs and wait for whatever comes along. In stead these spiders go out into the world, with big bright, sharply focused eyes, looking for fun and adventure.

Wolf Spider

With a large pair of front facing eyes, jumping spiders have especially endearing faces. Most jumping spiders stay quite small, but here in SoHum, I have seen some fairly large ones, at least big enough to photograph.

The spiders I find most endearing, however, are the ones I know most intimately, and I know them so intimately because they have lived with us for so long, and in such great numbers. “Daddy Long-Legs” spiders (Pholcus Phalangiodes) make cheerful easy going housemates, even if they do leave their webs and food remains all over the house.

They have a reputation for cannibalism, but I’ve never seen it. Quite the contrary. These spiders seem extremely tolerant of each other, and unlike most spiders, spend a lot of time in close proximity to each other, sharing the same web. I’ve often seen large pholcids steal food from smaller ones, but I’ve never seen a large pholcid attack a small one. I’ve seen them eat other spiders, including wolf spiders at least as large as themselves, but never each other.

Large and small pholcids happily share the same web, stepping over and around each other without hostility or fear. I’ve even seen two pholcids work together to “rope” a large fly snared in their shared web. The fly would have doubtless have struggled free from either of them, but working together they were able to subdue it. The two spiders then shared their meal.

I’ve watched them quite a bit, and for a year or so, I kept a journal of their daily lives and development. I gave them names like “Charlotte” “Wilbur” and “Templeton” and followed them from early adolescence, through several molts, to adulthood, mating and parenthood.

Pholcids love tenderly, and spend a lot of time “holding hands” with their chosen partner before mating. While male and female pholcids look identical to the naked eye for most of their lives, a mature and receptive female puts on a spectacular outfit to accentuate her femininity. She will invariably attract a mature male, perhaps a few, and she will eventually decide between them.

Female, in her sexy mating outfit, on right.

Then the couple will spend several days, up to two weeks or more, hanging out very close together in this “hand holding” phase. I’ve never seen pholcids mate. I think they do it in the dead of night while we are asleep, but soon, the female will have an egg sack clutched I her jaws. I have however, caught other species of spider in the act, I don’t think I’ll lose my wordpress account for posting hard-core spider-porn here.

Some would argue that these tiny invertebrates, lack any capacity for caring or emotion, but I disagree. One of these two young lovers got pinched in a window screen and died from the injury. It’s partner stayed with the dead spider for almost a week afterward. Yes, I believe that spiders love, and mourn.

Pholcid mothers devote themselves completely to raising their offspring. Once a pholcid mother has an egg sac in her jaws, she will not eat again until the young spiderlings have grown up and moved out.  It takes several weeks for the eggs to incubate and hatch, and the young spiderlings stay with their mother for at least two more weeks, until their first molt.

Mama Pholcid with newly hatched spiderlings

After they molt, the young spiders strike out on their own, leaving their mother, in her web, surrounded by dozens of tiny, recently shed, exoskeletons. Female pholcids can raise more than one brood of spiderlings. Occasionally, I’ll find a mother pholcid with an egg sac, surrounded by the exoskeletons of her previous brood. I guess I should dust more.

I hope you enjoyed the Halloween Spider Spectacular. Happy Halloween!

Mama pholcid with babies just about ready to move out

What We Can Learn From Starving Pelicans

What We Can Learn From Starving Pelicans

 

If you don’t live here on the West Coast, you probably haven’t heard about the pelicans. Hundreds of dead, starving and distressed pelicans have shown up on beaches from San Francisco Bay to Peugeot Sound. Here in Humboldt County, the animal rescue group Bird Ally X have now gone into crisis mode for the second time this year with another overwhelming influx of sick and injured pelicans.

Bird Ally X found most of the distressed pelicans around here suffering the same kinds of problems that birds caught in oil spills exhibit; oiled feathers compromising the bird’s natural insulation and waterproofing, leading to hypothermia and death. However, the oil in the birds’ feathers did not come from an oil spill, but from public fish-cleaning stations. A lot of sport fishermen use these cleaning stations to dress their catch before heading home, and the oily fish waste has become irresistible to the starving pelicans.

Pelicans have evolved over millions of years to catch small fish by diving into the water after them. Pelicans do not do very well on a diet of salmon heads, guts and bones, and the fish oil that pervades all of this fish waste, if it gets on their feathers, will do them in in a matter of hours. Please, support Bird Ally X and other groups now working frantically to feed, care for and rehabilitate literally hundreds of sick and injured pelicans, but recognize that starving seabirds is a bigger problem than these groups can solve.

This is not the first time starving seabirds have made headlines in recent years, but mostly, people seem to have gotten used to seeing dead birds scattered all over the beaches. The last time I went to the beach it looked like an avian Auschwitz, littered with dead gulls as far as the eye could see. This ain’t right folks. This is a symptom of something very serious.

In the news reports, they tell us that pelicans were once driven to the brink of extinction by the use of chemical pesticides like DDT, industrial pollution, and habitat loss, but the brown pelican has made a dramatic recovery in recent years and have again become common on the North Coast. They then explain that now that pelican populations have returned, there’s a lot more competition for food, so of course, some of them, mostly juveniles, starve.

That makes sense, right. Starving pelicans is not a tragedy. No, starving pelicans is a success story. These pelicans are only dying because there are too many pelicans, and there are too many pelicans because we’re just so damn good at wildlife conservation these days. Are you buying this?

Sure, pelicans have made a comeback, but consider this: 95% of the wild birds in the US have been wiped out. That includes pelicans. The few seabirds you see at the beach these days represent only a tiny fraction of historic populations. When Eureka was full of redwood trees, at least twenty times as many pelicans, gulls, cormorants, osprey, plovers, muriletts and who knows how many other species that have completely disappeared, made their homes around Humboldt Bay, and up and down the Lost Coast.

 

one of over 4,000 pelicans to die in Peru this year

Today, as the ghastly scene playing out on North Coast beaches reveals, our coastal ecosystem no longer supports enough life to maintain even these diminished bird populations. Far from a success story, this tragedy reveals how badly we’ve failed at wildlife conservation, and how little we know about the marine ecosystem.

I see people at the beach, doing their best to ignore the horror show going on around them. It’s bad folks. It should bum you out. Beaches should be strewn with sea shells, not bird skeletons. Don’t try to blow it off with the speculation that this is some cyclical thing that just happens from time to time, like they did with global warming. This is what we have done to planet Earth. Face it.

Look into the eyes of those starving birds, surrounded by their dead kin. Feel their anguish, their desperation, and their courage, as their world falls apart around them. Learn what you can from them, because its going to happen to us too.

Word Power, Heliculture

Word Power

Building Your Vocabulary, One Word at a Time

Heliculture

heliculture (hell ih cult yer) n the art, science, practice and folklore of raising snails

Simon and Garfunkle as Adolescents (Helix Aspersa)

About a year and a half ago, we adopted a snail we found on a plant at Sylvandale’s Garden Supply here in Redway. They were going to kill it, so we decided to give it another lease on life, and took it home as a pet. For a while, we kept it in a big jar with cheesecloth over the lid, and fed it lettuce leaves.

Garfunkle, aka Snail Friend, shortly after he joined our family

Amy misted it with a squirt bottle every day, which usually motivated it to come out of its shell and climb around for a while. After a while, it seemed lonely. I don’t exactly know why it seemed that way to us, but we went back to Sylvandale’s to see if we could find another one. We did, and they hit it off immediately. We often found them resting right next to each other, shell to shell.

Simon whispering to Garfunkle

When we just had one snail, we called it “Snail Friend”, but when we added the new one, we named them Simon and Garfunkle. We chose those names because of how quiet our new pets are, which reminded us of Simon and Garfunkle’s hit song “The Sounds of Silence”. At first Garfunkle, aka “Snail Friend”, the one we had the longest, was much larger than Simon, but they both grew rapidly.

Simon and Garfunkle (Simon is the little one on top in this photo)

Eventually we found a nice little aquarium with a fitted lid and transferred the snails into it. They really seemed to like the new digs, which had a nice layer of soil on the bottom, a couple rocks, and a piece of bark to create a diagonal ramp from the bottom corner to the top corner of their enclosure. They continued to grow, and Simon eventually grew to be the larger of the two.

Simon and Garfunkle in their Mason Jar Home

One evening, about two months ago, we noticed them necking rather enthusiastically. We knew they liked each other, but this got to be embarrassing to watch, so we put their aquarium away and gave them some privacy. About a week or so ago, we discovered dozens of tiny gray ovoid shaped masses about an eighth of an inch long, all over the inside of the aquarium. Baby snails! We have dozens of baby snails. Now what?

Baby Snails!

We checked out a book from the library about raising snails for food, titled, cryptically enough, Raising Snails for Food by Jacques Baratou, subtitled, “How to Make Friends With Garden Pests and Develop Them Into The Darlings of the Gourmet’s Table. We’ve done pretty well at the “making friends with garden pests” part, but I’m not sure we’re ready to “develop the darlings”, so to speak. However, I did discover this great word, heliculture.

Tiny snails in Amy’s palm

So, as we weigh our options at this critical juncture, and decide whether or not to join the distinguished ranks of the world’s heliculturalists, let me share a few photos of the proud new parents, and their babies, as well as a few facts I’ve learned about snail ranching:

Garfunkle with offspring

Snails have the most complicated sexual apparatus in the animal kingdom, and they are all hermaphroditic

Simon with baby

Snail ranchers ride specially bred horses that don’t run very fast, but are very careful about where they put their hooves down.

Baby Snails!

In France, snails have the right-of-way. Occasionally, french snail herders will have to cross a major road with their herd. This can tie up traffic for hours.

Proud Parents Simon and Garfunkle

Snail rodeos, where snail ranchers show off their snail-handling skills, and compete for prizes, have become high-stakes sporting events that draw competitors from all over the world. However, few spectators have the patience to sit through a snail rodeo, and as a result, the sport remains extremely obscure, outside of helicultural circles.

Simon with two babies

Word Power, Anthropophagous

Word Power

Building Your Vocabulary One Word At A Time

Anthropophagous

 

anthropophagous (ant threh ‘poff eh gus) adj. Feeding on human flesh

…not to be confused with another word that’s pronounced the same way, but has a slightly different spelling…

anthropophagus (ant threh ‘poff eh gus) n. Man-eater

 

So, an anthropophagus is by definition anthropophagous, and anything that is anthropophagous must be an anthropophagus. If that’s not confusing enough, an anthropophogologist studying this phenomena, and those that practice it, might title his book on the subject, Anthropophagy of the World’s Anthropophagi.

 

While anthropophogology may seem like a very narrow field of study, limited to only a very few indigenous tribes, some extreme survival situations, and the occasional unfortunate encounter with one of the remaining non-human large predators, consider the future.

As time goes on, and the human population continues its explosive growth, displacing most other life forms on planet Earth, I suspect more of us will adopt an anthropophagous diet. Someday we may have a rich tradition of culinary anthropophagy to satisfy the drooling anthropophagi of the future.

 

Yes the future looks bright for anthropophagy, and for aspiring young anthropophagi, and thanks to this column, you will be prepared to discuss it, without using the “c” word, they get so sensitive about.