Misplaced in Time

North America had, during the last interglacial period between periods of what we call Ice Ages, various forms of mega fauna that we usually associate with Africa today. Besides the so-called giant horses, bone-crushing dogs, and giant forms of sloth, there were hairy rhinos and elephants, the latter usually went by names like mastodon and mammoth. Camelids even seem to have likely originated in North America before moving all over the world, but this was before the cooling periods of the Ice Ages.

There were even a specialized type of giraffe that developed in North America, and it was naturally selected for speed instead of stretching for leaves high in a tree.

AND it never went extinct.

Today is remains, a speedster without a hunter, the second fastest land mammal on Earth, only breached in velocity by the highest speed achieved by a cheetah, and that predator remains an ocean and continent away.

This is the pronghorn. Sometimes called the "pronghorn antelope" and, for some reason in my memory it's known as the "pronghorn sheep," it is actually neither an antelope nor a sheep. It is an Ice Age remnant, occasionally described using the loathed-by-the-scientific-community term "living fossil," similar to California condors and the coelacanth.

And it's our very own giraffe-kin.

I didn't know this, that pronghorns were more giraffe than antelope, and that's pretty cool.

Missing Out on Fish-Tank Accessories

Whoa! I've never had a fish tank, so maybe I should go easy on myself. On a trip to Pet's Smart (so the boy could see a bunch of animals), I realized that I'm woefully behind some of the cool shit people can put into their fish tanks.

Observe:

What??!? A dragon-monster throttling an octopus?

There were various sunken-ship themed pieces, even a sunken WWII plane:

Of the sunken-ruins themed pieces, this Buddhist-inspired one was my favorite:

It almost makes me want to figure out how to make an aquarium work for us. 

We've got at least a decade before we'll be able to even think about something as serious as an aquarium. But still, it's nice to know that the submerged gear will be very cool.

One-Seed Invertebrates

I am an academic, a book-guy, even a nerd guy, but I'm also a fan of sports, and sometimes conversations can be interesting that are bred from the idea of trying to rank specific things and then pit them against each other in a bracketed-ranking system, ala the NCAA basketball tournament commonly known as March Madness.

I was thinking the other day while at the aquarium what would a 64-member bracket look like if every entrant was an invertebrate? What would the top invertebrates look like? Who would command the one-seeds like the blue-bloods in the basketball tourney? Who would be the UNCs and Dukes of the invertebrate world?

This is just a silly waste of brain energy, but I was thinking hard about it, and these are my picks for the one-seed invertebrates:

Ants:

Some of the most aggressive and industrious animals on earth, the bio-mass of ants is equal to our own, which means there's a writhing pile of ants just as big as you, crawling around on this planet.

Octopus:

Highly intelligent, occasionally mischievous, multi-brained and spotted with chromatophores, octopusses are as close as anything is to intelligent alien life we can find on this planet.

Jellyfish:

Jellies come in as some of the most poisonous critters on earth and are one of the highly successful non-bilaterally symmetric animals, as in, jellyfish have no natural line of symmetry about which there are obvious biological reflective differences.

Bristle/Bobbit Worm:

Razor sharp claw/fangs round out this one-meter long ambush predator/nightmare. These are freaking fish murdering worms, one of the most voracious predators in its ecosystem---the sandy shallows of Indonesia and similarly tropical climes.

**

Arthropods, cephalopods, jellies, polychaetes...I have a weird imagination that likes to link together things I think are cool, and then discussions come naturally because of the way someone like me thinks about sports.

I'm sure I missed something...let me know if anything seems glaring.

The Orange County Zoo

My Spring Break came and went, and on the day that Cass does not have daycare, we decided to go on a zoological adventure.

Specifically, an adventure to a zoo. We've been wanting to take our boy to the zoo, a zoo, any zoo for a while now, mostly because he does quite well with his animal words from the books we read to him. And he, er, reads to us.

So we looked at the realities of taking a not-quite-three-year-old to a zoo. Reality 1: He won't realistically remember. The great and fine details won't be so implanted in his memory as much as the feeling of being loved and having fun out and about with mom and dad.

Reality 2: If he won't remember, then the traveling and financial realities can and, rather, should, factor into the decision making process.

The best zoo "around:" obviously, the San Diego Zoo/African Safari/Marine Park location. That will be an awesome adventure, when he's older and the 90 minute drive can be spent productively. (Um, sure, daddy...sure.)

The next best zoo around is the LA Zoo, and coming in third is the Orange County Zoo. The LA zoo is in Griffith Park, near the Observatory and close to Dodger Stadium. While barely thirty miles away, it's nearly an hour and a half in real time. Tickets are nearly thirty bucks a person, but discounted for our toddler.

The OC zoo is in Irvine, in the John Irvine Park. While barely thirty miles away, it's about a half hour away in real time. Tickets are two bucks a person, and toddlers are free.

One caveat: the only African animal they had was a serval, and it lost a foot at some point in the past. The serval and the ocelot were the most exotic animals. They had two bears, but one had had an accident when it was a cub and had nearly had its head caved in. 'It may act strange' the plaque said.

They had two pumas, one forlornly walked the perimeter like a bored dog. They had some neat birds of prey, both golden and bald eagles, perched on branches with annoyed looks in their eyes, sitting nearly as tall as my son.

Me and zoos...

Here are some pictures:

Cassius is calling after the mountain lion, "Meow! MEOW! Where you going, Meow?" That's what he calls cats, meows.

An ocelot, lamenting the lack of Mexican jungles in his cell pen.

The pens were laid out snugly like someone would in a back area of a ranch, which is pretty much what this place is.

A golden eagle above, the picture not doing justice to the true size and presence of the majestic creature. In an odd moment, all of the big birds of prey had their right wing out, as if to say, "Yo. 'Sup."

Golden eagles are...brown.

They had charts and face-hole photo-op boards:

No, do THIS with your arms...do THIS...

They had a playground and even a train. The train was excitement incarnate...for Cass. 

There will be a time for more thorough and exotic experiences with other wild animals, captive or not.

One last shot of the puma:

Not the Ending I Remember

After getting the Boy down a few weekends ago, we watched the old Ashton Kutcher vehicle "The Butterfly Effect."

I remember thinking that it would be stupid when I saw commercials when it first came out, but when I watched it with Tony when he was on his DVD purchasing binge, I found it quite good. At least WAY better than I had been thinking go into it. Low expectations and all...

But in the fifteen or seixteen years since having seen it, I was taken aback again, like the first time, with the timing and the craziness of the story.

A kid named Evan has strange blackouts. He'll come to at certain times with no recollection of some previous set of minutes. As he gets older he keeps a journal about the blackouts, and finally when he reaches college, he studies and is a star-wunderkind in the discipline of brain-science and memory. This is Ashton Kutcher, the oldest iteration of Evan.

Three actors play the character Evan, and the first, the youngest, is a super dead-ringer for Kutcher, and the middle young-teen is a little off of the other two, but not so much that it jars a viewer.

After picking up a girl at a bar and taking her back to his room, she finds his old journals and asks him to read one. It has to do with a traumatic event (of which there are plenty in this movie), and his vision starts to shimmer and it turns out he's transplanted back to the exact time of the event.

He thinks its just a vision, but it turns out that he can travel back to the moments in his life when he had blacked out and become himself again, with the knowledge of his older self.

He seeks out the main love interest from his childhood to get some information from that time, and it of course sends her down a terrible memory path, and she ends up killing herself.

The main lady actress, Amy Smart, dead after one scene a half hour into the movie. Now that's jarring. And bold.

Kutcher decides to actually try to do something in the past. When he comes to, his entire world has changed. The Butterfly Effect in action. Now he's a frat boy and with his childhood sweetie, Amy Smart again, only playing a fully different version of a character with the same name as the first one.

This reality ends badly, and Evan goes back to change things again, and then that one ends badly, and on and on it goes---Evan tries to fix things only to make them worse. Well, worse for some.

Then the movie ramps up to the end, and I was waiting and waiting for the ending I saw originally, only for it to end completely differently.

"What the hell is this?" I shouted at my television.

They pass on the street, nearly strangers, seven years after the college time block? They pass on the street like ships in the night?

The ending I saw was the Director's Cut, apparently, and I found it a more satisfying completion of the story it seemed like they were trying to tell, if it was far more sad and realistic.

Anyway, I would recommend "The Butterfly Effect," but strongly suggest the Director's Cut. If you can only find the the Netflix offer with the theatrical ending, so be it. This movie is ambitious and original, and Ashton Kutcher is, frankly, pretty great as Evan.

All the actors are really solid, and Amy Smart is awesome as different iterations of the same character.

Pinnipedia and Sirenia Musings

I've been so busy and have too many things to want to put up here, but can't seem to make the time in the evening lately. Life is just like that sometimes.

Anyway, I have this post for right now, a post that would have felt right at home in 2009 back when I would have done this exact thing: inexplicably describe a tiny corner of this world's biosphere and the connections that were until then unknown to me.

**

In my imagination, I tended to rank the walrus as the largest pinniped, the marine mammal clade that hosts seals, sea lions, and walruses. The tusks on the walrus can max out at one meter, and seeing as how natural (see "not excessively huge") they looked in pictures led to this conclusion.

Was it true? Are walruses the largest pinnipeds?

At our aquarium here in Long Beach, the Aquarium of the Pacific, they have a very cool pinnipedia area with three harbor seals (one is a year old pup!) and three sea lions, which dwarf the seals. The largest is the massive Parker, an old bull sea lion that's older than he'd be able to live in the wild. Here he is:

He doesn't look that massive in this picture, but he'll be hitting 800 pounds by this summer, which is, eh, good-sized.

Certainly smaller than a walrus, right?

So, then one day we were watching an episode of Blue Planet II and they were showing the bull elephant seals fighting on the beach:

These mountains of critter bashing each other to bloody messes got me thinking: how could a walrus be bigger than one of these things? I mean, seriously:

And that's a smaller female...

So, I did what I used to do all the time when I had the late-night time: crawled down the rabbit hole.

It turns out both northern elephant seals and southern elephant seals are larger on average than walruses. I ended up finding this comparative poster from an aquarium or museum:

This then got me thinking about dugongs and manatees.

When it comes to aquatic and marine mammals, besides the water-weasels---otters---we've got cetaceans, aka the whales, broken up into the mysteceti (baleen whales) and odontoceti (toothed whales); the pinnipeds, seals and sea lions; and the vegetarian dugong and manatee, whatever they were.

I thought they were closely connected to each other, but knew that they weren't whales or water-bear-pinnipeds. This was part of the rabbit hole dive. I remember hearing that they were closer to elephants than to anything else. The dugong looked pretty freaking big in a different episode of Blue Planet. How did it size up to the manatees? And the largest pinnipeds?

Manatees and dugongs are in the clade Sirenia, so called because they were mistaken for, eh, shapely mermaids or sirens. Sirenia is in the lineage that had a rather recent common ancestor with elephants and hyraxes.

I found this comparative poster for them as well:

Manatees are more massive than dugongs on average, and are larger than many pinnipeds as well. Both are far closer in day-today behavior to cattle than the fish-and-penguin hunting pinnipeds, so those plump and doughy looking bodies are in fact plump and doughy. Those massive and surly elephant seals may look round and blubberous, they, in fact, could chase you or me down on the sand, having that inch-worm like locomotion called galumphing.

It was always a strange imagination I use to have, being chased down the beach by a gigantic seal. They used to beach themselves in Cambria, close by to Cal Poly, and we'd take trips to look at them. One of the bulls I remember thinking was at least as big as my Datsun 240-Z.

I think as a kid I preferred sea lions, but mostly because they're closer in appearance to dogs than the galumphing seals. Elephant seals, though, don't eff around. So I don't know where I am with that...(like it matters).

**

I have a few more posts like this, random old school stuff that I've been working over in my head for a while...