Roadrunner twice…

During 2019’s Big Bike Ride, roadrunners were a constant companion. Here’s a resident of Terligua, TX; the photo was taken the morning after our epic “Chisos Mtns. by Supermoonlight” night ride.

Roadrunner, roadrunner.

Sometime during the ride I had a revelation.

Way back, maybe the mid-aughts? – there were a smattering of news stories about getting chickens to express teeth . Looking back, it seems to have been the result of a particular mutation that unsupresses a gene. Always fatal, alas. But then in 2015 there was another mini-storm of stories, this time focusing on a couple facial development genes.

The researchers focused on two genes that help control the development of the middle of the face. The activity of these genes differed from that of reptiles early in embryonic development. They developed molecules that suppressed the activity of the proteins that these genes produced, which led to the embryos developing snouts that resembled their ancestral dinosaur state.*

From there, coverage jumped to Chickenosauruses – not a new idea (see this Jack Horner TED talk from 2011), but hey, clicks are clicks.

The revelation should be obvious: a better candidate for doing the throwback thing on would be everyone’s favorite ground cuckoo, Geococcyx!

Around the time of the bike ride, Andy Frazer/DragonsofWales kickstarted his book, Novosaurs. I jumped on the opportunity to support his work and when Novosaurs arrived, it did not disappoint. I contacted Andy about doing a commission, he was happy to do it, and so I give you the novosaur roadrunner, a feathered companion I’d seriously love to have.

 

Godzilla Minus One

Even here in southeastern New Mexico, land of cattle and oil, the echoes of The Bomb, WWII and the Cold War continue to reverberate. Seen in the checkout line last Sunday:

Roswell Daily Record

My friend S told me about a small museum at the airport devoted to the history of Walker AFB. Seemed like a perfect prequel to a Godzilla movie and boy howdy, was it ever. Walker AFB was where the 509th CG was based after WWII – the 509th dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Enola Gay cap

After the war, the 509th participated in Operation Crossroads – they were the first post-Trinity tests and took place at Bikini Atoll. You’ve seen footage of Baker (the second test), I’m sure. There was a photo of Baker in the museum; I didn’t realize at the time that there’d be a direct through-line to the night’s movie. Speaking of through-lines, I lived with the 509th as a neighbor during the Reagan years. They were flying FB-111s out of Pease AFB in New Hampshire and between a SAC base on one side and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on the other, I took grim comfort in knowing that if Ronnie managed to start a nuclear war, I’d likely never know.

Then it was off to the movin’ picture show. Godzilla Minus One is, imho, really good. I’m not going to offer any criticism or analysis – when I watch a movie I’m fully engaged (at least the first time). If I can stand back and look at the movie as a movie, it’s either something I don’t like or it’s a “so bad it’s good” MST3K kind of experience. GMO was neither of those; it’s an excellent re-telling of the origin story (spoiler: Operation Crossroads did it) set in WWII, devastated post firebombing Tokyo, and finally Japan as the country was just starting to get back on its feet. Strong recommendation!

Ky?sh? J7W Shinden model

Oh, no reason…

 

Roadrunner once…

A confession: I’ve had a series of roadrunner posts rattling around in my head for a year and a half or so. Did I acually write them? We all know the answer. Just now I was about to post some pix to Instagram and realized that I had a post’s worth of captioning, so here goes. Not what I’d planned as the 1st roadrunner post, but perhaps this will break the logjam.

Roadrunner public art

The Word of the Day is zygodactyl. Most bird feet are three toes in front, 1 in back; they’re anisodactyl. A few, including many woodpeckers, owls, parrots and cuckoos, have two in front and two behind: they’re zygodactyl.

This is a left foot I salvaged from a roadkill roadrunner yesterday (not to worry, legal eagles, I disposed of it after taking a couple pix). The X – and thus the very distinctive roadrunner track – is obvious.

Left foot of a roadrunner

After looking at the foot for a bit, I had a question. Does the same toe rotate back in all zygodactyl birds? Is there zygodactyl chirality?? Turns out the answer is yes, same toe always. BECAUSE THERE’S A DIFFERENT WORD IF THE OTHER TOE GOES BACK!

zygodactyl/heterodactyl

In the above diagram (yanked from this Wikipedia page) we’re looking at right feet, 4 is the outer front toe in anisodactyl birds and 2 is the inner toe. From that same Wikiped page, “heterodactyl arrangement only exists in trogons.”

New goal: see a zygodactyl bird (roadrunner) and a heterodactyl bird (elegant trogon) in the same area. If there are still a couple trogons hanging around far southern Arizona this January (there were last year), it might be possible after Christmas.

Subterranean islands

Greetings from southeastern New Mexico, on the edge of the Permian Basin. Maisie, the birds, and I are well into the ’23/’24 Southwest Peregrination and we’re all having a very nice time. Yesterday was forecast to be very windy – not a good day for flying the birds – so I traveled down to Carlsbad Caverns N.P. to take a walk underground.

First things first. The cave system was gorgeous and HUGE. The entrance was familiar – I’m positive it was the background for the freetailed bat illustration in my childhood Mammals: A guide to familiar American species Golden Guide.The shape? Yes. The scale? Yikes!

cave entrance from above

From the surface, it’s a 1.25mi/2k hike down switchbacks until you are 750’/245m down at the Big Room. The walk around the Big Room is a similar distance, but flat. A single chamber that takes about an hour to circumnavigate on paved paths. Big.

Part of the Big Room

As I was walking, I couldn’t help but compare Carlsbad to Kartchner Caverns. I visited Kartchner last winter – it’s in southern Arizona and was discovered and opened as a show cave more recently than Carlsbad. There are obvious similarities: humidity, temperature, formations, but they felt different. I’m putting it down to what I’m calling metabolism (I’m sure there’s a real term of art for this). Kartchner has a higher metabolic rate – more dripping, more wet surfaces, more of a feel that things are growing – still on a very long time scale, but… Cave systems are unique – I knew this intellectually, but feeling the difference between 2 pretty similar systems was striking.

The other thing that I’ve been thinking about since yesterday’s hike has been the “island” aspect of cave ecosystems. Kartchner Caverns is in the Sky Island region of southern Arizona – a desert with mountaintop ecological islands. It makes for fantastic hiking and biking – moving through very different kinds of habitats as one climbs. Similarly as one descends below the surface, the parameters change. Temperature and humidity stabilize and light disappears. Something that has adapted to Carlsbad (below the twilight zone) is not going to be able to pull up stakes and migrate to the next cave system along. I’m thinking primarily of microscopic critters – bacteria and pals – but big respect to cave crickets and salamanders and all the other macro beasts, too.

I’ll be back in Sky Island country after the holidays – I plan on going back to Kartchner Caverns (note to self – look at their calendar for cameras-allowed special tours) and will definitely be rolling this stuff around in my head as the squad and I go exploring aboveground.

Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex (2003)

Last Wednesday, alerted by Toho Studios on my Instagram feed, I put aside my distaste for indoor crowds* and toddled off to Albuquerque to see a special showing of Godzilla: Tokyo SOS. When I got there, I realized northern New Mexico was a perfect spot to watch a Godzilla flick: bomb references are everywhere, including the Fallout Trampoline Arena next door to the cineplex.

Screenshot_20230322_222450_Pokmon GO

After the interminable coming attractions the show started with something I didn’t quite get. Was It a prequel clip? How was this going to tie in? Is Gigan in Tokyo SOS, too? It was really cool though, so this morning I googled around to see if I could find out more. Indeed I could; my goog-fu is still adequate!

Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex (… Gojira buiesu Gaigan Rekusu) is a 3D-animated Godzilla short film written and directed by Takuya Uenishi. It is a sequel to Uenishi’s 2019 fan film G vs. G, which he submitted to GEMSTONE’s Godzilla contest, winning the chance to work with Toho in an official capacity. It was screened during Godzilla Fest 2022 on November 3, 2022 and subsequently released on YouTube.*

Here it is in all its glory – if nothing else go to the 5 minute mark to see Gigan Rex power up. Watching in the theater, I didn’t notice that it was 3D animated. Part of the reason is that when I watch a movie, if I’m enjoying it I tend to immerse myself. There’s no little Roger Ebert on my shoulder analyzing things – it’s why I’d be a suck film critic. But the other reason is that Takuya Uenishi does a great job capturing the feel of Toho practical effects. Enjoy!

A musical observation… There are a couple of phrases (edit – the word I was looking fore is leitmotif – thank you Wikipedia) that put me immediately and directly into a cinematic universe. The first, obv, is Godzilla’s theme. And the second? Watch the last bit of Yojimbo.

*If I wasn’t stuffing popcorn into my face I was masked up for the duration of indoor time.

A few remarks on “The Last of Us”

Fungus among us!

First, a general strong thumbs up. I’m currently in L.A. with the west coast branch of the family and they’ve been watching, so I caught up (eps 1 – 3) before the post Super Bowl group viewing brought me current last night. Good characters, good story-line(s), good monsters. Yay!

Second, I’m glad that I watched episode 3 alone. No spoilers, but it really moved me. There was uglycrying.

Third, and finally, y’all will want to get busy schmoozing me, because as soon as I figure out the connection between this blog post and the THoU video game and then win $$$$ in my intellectual property suit I’m gonna be rolling in dough. Fabulously wealthy, I tell you! The key passage:

Blog post went up July 14, 2008 & The Last of Us video game began development in 2009. My simple country lawyer will make mincemeat of them,

Kelp

Since my last post I’ve done a bit more riding: up the California coast to Monterey and back to Los Angeles. I’ll post the travelogue in a bit; right now I’m going to focus on the reason for my ride, namely, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Everyone I know who’s visited the Aquarium has raved about it and seeing what all the talk was about was  a priority. I spent 2 ‘rest’ days in Monterey at the aquarium – I knew that I’d be overwhelmed after 4 or 5 hours and knew there was more that 4 hours worth of things to see.

Wednesday was ‘get acquainted’ day. I dropped Lotte at doggy day care, cycled back to the motel, dropped the bike and walked through Cannery Row to the aquarium. It was fantastic. Multiple large tanks, each focusing on a specific habitat, great exhibits on cephalopods and Baja California, just great stuff.

Kelp forest tank

The kelp forest tank.

The deep reef from above

The deep reef from above.

The top of the kelp forest tank.

A tank full of Lookdowns.

Not all the action was indoors. From the sea-side balconies I saw sea otters in the kelp and a sea lion preying on what an Aquarium volunteer guessed was a young adult Mola mola. As I expected, I was used up about four and a half hours in, so I walked back to my room, mounted up and retrieved the pup.

The next day started the same way, but a little bit later, because I was scheduled to take a behind the scenes tour at 2:30. Going behind the scenes was great – we saw the food prep area, the veterinary suite and the top of one of the large tanks.

Fridge

Just like my fridge!

Necropsy lab

Necropsy area

Reef tanks top

Service balcony at the top of the deep reef.

One of the coolest things I learned on the tour, though, has to do with the orange buoy shaped object in the photo below. It’s a pig.

pig!

The Monterey Bay Aquarium uses seawater from the bay for many of the tanks (all of the big tanks, I think?). The water is filtered during the day to ensure good visibility in the displays, but gets pumped in raw at night. As a result, there’s been a lot of colonization – algae, sea stars, etc, coming in as plankton and growing out in the tanks. What folks didn’t anticipate was that the same thing would happen in the seawater intake pipes; it did. The Aquarium needs to pig the pipes every couple weeks to keep them flowing freely! I don’t know why I find the whole thing delightful, but I do.

An excellent visit to a great aquarium! It moved ‘learn to dive’ way up on my priority list – I want to swim through the kelp forest!

The Chiricahua Mountains

I wanted to say a little more about the Chiricahua Mountains; when I met Drew in El Paso he told the that the Chiricahuas were an absolute must-experience and he was right. They’re an ecological Four Corners: Rockies from the north, Sierra Madre from the south, Chihuahuan desert from the east and Sonoran desert from the west. Add in the effects of altitude – a change in vegetation, etc. every thousand feet – and you have one of those meeting places in the landscape with incredible diversity. The part of the ride that took me through Cave Creek Canyon was my favorite – I’m a sucker for bosque dells.

Cave Creek Canyon

I’d mentioned that hummingbirds woke me up in Portal; “In fact, thirteen species of hummingbirds are know to occur in the Chiricahua Mountains, and many of these are Mexican species that are rarely seen in the United States.”*


One of the big draws is the Elegant Trogon* – I was told I was a week too early to see one, but B’s feed on Strava indicates it was more like 4 days. Ah, well – a good excuse to return with birding as a focus. I did see a Gould’s turkey, so that’s 2 new wild turkey subspecies this trip (the other is the Rio Grande turkey). Merriam’s wild turkey is a possibility in a week; I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

One last reason to dig the area – Portal has very dark skies. The stars at night are amazing!

*pronunciation note – I’ve always said ‘trogon’ with a hard G, but I heard someone say trojawn in Portal. Google search says hard G is correct; maybe the J person was from Philly – or maybe Google is wrong?

 

Stateless Stochastic Automatons

…is my krautrock band name. Seriously, while driving to NYC last weekend, I finally started listening to Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders’ podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct – specifically, ep. 18: Alien Minds. It was so good that I listened a second time on my way home; strongest possible recommendation. The episode addresses alien minds in 3 big chunks: alien aliens (little green men/BEMs), AI/created minds and aliens that live on the planet with us.

The outer space alien portion focused partly on communication (my sweet spot) – it caused me to add Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series to my TBR list and made me think about a couple of my favorite aliens. The Ariekei/Hosts of China Miéville’s Embassytown speak with two mouths driven by one mind and their “Language does not allow for lying or even speculation, the Language reflects both their state of mind and reality as they perceive it”.* There are a bunch of interesting things going on: language/mind feedback, the destabilizing effect of new ‘technology’ and, for me especially, the Fall (of Babel/from a state of language perfection) as the Hosts learn to lie. The other aliens that sprang to mind were the Wang Carpets from Greg Egan’s Diaspora. I honestly don’t remember whether communication ever got established with the Carpets, but they were a great stab at building an intelligence that was barely recognizable.

[A] voyaging ship has found the first example [of alien life] on planet Orpheus, large “carpets” submerged and slowly moving through an ocean. The carpets hardly seem candidates for sentient life, each one being comprised of a single long carbohydrate molecule. But it turns out they are behaving as a Turing Machine made up of Wang tiles (renamed Wang’s Carpets by the human clones who discovered them).

Wang tiles are a mathematical system proposed by Hao Wang in the form of a conjecture that [simplified version:] square tiles with differently coloured sides can fill an plane, and if so in a periodic pattern. Hao Wang argued that if the such a tiling exists that would imply that there is also an algorithm that would decide if such a pattern exists. Wang’s student showed that there is no such algorithm and the tiling problem is undecidable.

The Wang Carpets on Orpheus are doing that computation, but instead of the simple two-dimensional case proposed by Hao Wang, in this story the carpets occupy many levels in the ocean and thus an immensely powerful computation is going on (and can be visualised by Fourier analysis). An intelligence comprised of a multidimensional Turing Machine. *

The AI minds portion was excellent as well – encoded biases/non-neurotypical AI minds/&c, but I’m going to just tell you to listen. I’m going on longer than I wanted and am going to cut to the chase; the portion where Newitz and Anders talk to Lisa Margonelli about her book, Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology. Most of my exposure to eusocial insects is via the Hymenoptera as a beekeeper and as a lover of both Uncle Milton and Six legs Better. Termites are different critters entirely. They’re most closely related to cockaroaches and rely on their gut biota to digest cellulose. A superorganism with symbiotic protists, which in turn have bacterial ectosymbiotes? Hell yes. What really got me going was the discussion (35:27) of what I am assuming (bought the book, haven’t cracked it yet) are Macrotermes colonies.

Macrotermes colonies host a remarkable symbiotic relationship with a basidiomycete fungus, Termitomyces. The termites cultivate the fungi in a fungus garden, comprising a few hundred fungus combs, structures built from chewed up grass and wood, and inoculated with fungal spores. Each year, these fungi produce a crop of large mushrooms (pictured at left), known locally as omajowa, which are highly prized as a delicacy.

Unlike the fungi cultivated by leaf-cutter ants, which the ant colony uses as food, the Termitomyces culture in a Macrotermes nest aids in the breakdown of cellulose and lignin into a more nutritious compost which serves as the termites actual food. The fungus garden is, therefore, a kind of extracorporeal digestive system, to which termites have ‘outsourced’ cellulose digestion. *

An aside – I inoculated some logs last spring with shiitake and oyster mushroom spawn and it occurred to me at the time that what I was doing was turning wood into food with a fungal assist.

fungus comb

I’m unclear as to whether Macrotermes have the same gut biota as other termites (wait!! see below) – guess I need to read Underbug. Regardless, what a superorganism! What a community! Extra bonus – one of the species of fungus, Termitomyces titanicus, “has a cap that may reach 1 metre (3 ft) in diameter on a stipe up to 22 inches (57 cm) in length and is reputed to be the largest edible mushroom in the world.”* Termite-stuffed mushroom caps anyone (totally serious)?

By Blimeo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56726209

P.S. It occured to me as I was proofreading that perhaps I could do a google search on ‘macrotermes gut biota’ and yes, there are papers!

Sub-miniature Graboid

Via Tetzoo, a critter that I would love to see on the the Big Bike Ride! Dr. Naish’s post is on speculative, “could yet be discovered” animals that are not already cryptozoological cliches – so no Nessie. The whole thing is a lot of fun but the entry for “A gigantic, predatory, limbed amphisbaenian” really caught my attention.

Among the weirdest of amphisbaenians are the ajolotes (or bipedids), the only extant group to possess limbs. These limbs are not small stumps or flaps (as they are in some other near-limbless, serpentine squamates) but well-developed, clawed forelimbs. According to some phylogenetic models, ajolotes are not the sister-group to limbless amphisbaenians but deeply nested within the limbless clade (Conrad 2008, Videl et al. 2008), in which case their limbedness – if you will – perhaps evolved from limbless ancestors. Add to this the fact that some amphisbaenians are robust-jawed, short-faced predators of vertebrates that ambush prey from beneath the surface and bite chunks from the bodies of surface-dwelling mammals and reptiles.

[…]

So then… where oh where are the giant, limbed, robust-skulled, vertebrate-eating amphisbaenians? By ‘giant’, I am not talking about a graboid-sized monster of several metres (though that would be nice), but a more reasonable animal of a mere 1.5 metres or so. Easily the stuff of nightmares. They could inhabit warm regions of any continent.

So what’re these ajolores? The word references 2 very different animals: the axolotl of Lake Xochimilco (endangered in the wild) and the Mexican mole lizard of Baja California – obv it’s the latter we’re interested in.

Bipes biporus is a small pink worm-like lizard with forellimbs only – no hind legs. Their scalation is segmented and used. peristaltically, to move through burrows. The big digger feet move sand out of the way (see the illustration in the Tetzoo post) and the blunt head helps in their fossorial fun.

I wanna see one!

Bipes biporus.jpg
By marlin harms, CC BY 2.0, Link

And in case ‘graboid‘ doesn’t ring a bell: