Yesterday I wrote for ScienceNOW about how piranhas got their pointy teeth. The main thing I learned about piranhas is, really, they aren’t that bad. I talked to two people who have spent a lot of time catching piranhas in the wild and neither has been bitten, other than a little friendly snapping when the piranha was already out of the water. One had a friend who was bitten, though, and it was kind of nasty – the fish took out a chunk of flesh and the guy had to go to the hospital.
I was writing about this guy, Megapiranha – he’s a 3-foot-long extinct piranha relative with interesting teeth. (If you are a person who is interested in piranha evolution.)
Also totally cool: the pacus, which are related to piranhas and look a lot like them, but don’t eat meat. To quote John Lundberg, one of the ichthyologists I talked to: “They really are frugivores. It’s pretty amazing. The pacus that are in the Amazon and Orinoco, they’ll go into flooded forests during the high water season and they’ll wait underneath fruit trees that are coming into maturity. They’ll just hang out. The fruits drop into the water and they float away. Of course the fishermen see that and they fish with fruit.”
Isn’t that funny? Forget nightcrawlers, somebody get this fish a nice juicy piece o’ fruit. He says he watched fishermen in Suriname take a really long pole and put a piece of fruit on the end – something that looks kind of like a kiwi – and slap the fruit on the water. The pacus totally go for it.
art copyright Ray Troll, 2005
Apparently now I’m not just any old science writer, I’m a biomechanics writer. First it was how snakes move, then why birds have trouble when they get big, and today, the third story that cements the trend: how dogs avoid popping wheelies.
I think the lab that did the dog work has the coolest lab excursions – they go to the greyhound track. Usually they’re there during the day, when you can get video of one dog at a time in good light, and without having to worry about the stands being full of excitable gamblers. They set up the cameras pretty far away so they can get the dogs doing the whole straightaway in one shot.
“It is quite a different experience when it’s dark and you stand right up by the track,” says zoologist Jim Usherwood, one of the authors. “On race night with a beer in your hand, you can get 10 feet away from a greyhound going full pelt and say, ‘That animal really is flying.’”
I asked him what their top speed was, and he said about 19 meters per second (ah, physicists). Google tells me that is over 42 miles an hour. Yeah, that’s fast.
Tagged Under : fish, food
Someone helpfully stopped by my post on sardines and left a link to this blog: Society for the Appreciation of the Lowly Tinned Sardine. It includes many lovely photographs of sardine tins on well-appointed plates – apparently you’re supposed to actually smack the opened can down in the middle of all your tasty garden vegetables and stuff. They also seem to put a lot of thought into the drinks paired with the sardines. Huh.
Wow, check it out: chocolate sardines. Don’t worry, there’s no actual sardines inside those wrappers. I hope. If anyone’s in France around Easter, I want some – you hear me?
Yay! The Science Channel has posted more of my quizzes!
Manhattan Project: Oh yes I DID quote the [name of composer redacted] opera Doctor Atomic.
Magnets: This one includes a historic polar exploration photo. Nice work, art person!
Engineering: This one has a reference to the Arctic, too. I am relentless.
For all my Science Channel quizzes click here.
I really need a new headset.
I didn’t take a picture of the right side of my face for comparison, but I’ll just assure you that my other ear is not bright red, nor are the buttons of my phone imprinted into my other cheek.
I have a headset that plugs into one of my cordless phones. But with that setup, I can barely hear the people who talk really loud, let alone people like the very quiet scientist I just interviewed. What I want is a headset that plugs into the corded phone, between the phone and the handset. I have a feeling the good ones cost a lot of money. I had a really good one at my last job, but I’m just too darn moral to steal office equipment. Sigh.
The other day I was at the grocery store, and I had tuna on my list. It’s easy, it keeps more or less forever, it fits in cans, I can put it on salads. But then when I was actually standing in front of the canned fish, I was hit by this sudden wave of guilt at using giant, long-lived fish at the top of the food chain for cheap protein. I’ve heard many talks in which people who understand the oceans say we really ought to be eating bait fish. (And I’ve been buying tuna all along, so I don’t know why the guilt chose last Saturday to set in.) I looked at the other cans on the shelf.
Which brings me to today’s lunch:
I haven’t quite been able to figure out the full environmental implications of this choice. Fish are confusing. If you look up “tuna” on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website, there are six different kinds of tuna, and whether or not you should buy them depends on how they’re caught. If you look up sardines, they give you two options, actual sardines and atlantic herring – but it seems that what I have is actually a little Atlantic fish called a “brisling” or “sprat,” which the Monterey Bay Aquarium doesn’t cover. (Read about sprat here.)
But I do understand food webs, and sardines are way lower down than tuna are. It’s like eating grain-eating chickens instead of man-eating tigers – it’s a more efficient use of resources. Fortunately, they taste pretty good. I polled my Facebook friends, and the consensus was that they should be on toast. A former choir director also suggested a large whisky and soda. I haven’t added that particular flourish yet, but I can’t imagine a large whisky and soda would make anything worse.
I learned a ton of awesome things when I was in the Bering Sea this spring. I also learned one important lesson when I got home: Don’t leave your car for six weeks without driving it. I guess since I drive my car so rarely anyway, it didn’t seem like a big deal to just let it sit there for a while. Ok, so, one new battery and one scraping-of-rust-off-brakes later, I’d learned my $500 lesson. Since my mechanic had the car anyway, I had him disconnect the central locking system, which is one of the dumber features of the ‘93 Jetta, and I’ve been much happier ever since.
Until Wednesday night, when I discovered that the central locking system unlocks the little door over the gas cap. Let me tell you, I had a perplexing couple of minutes at the gas station before I figured that out. I called the mechanic today, he told me how to open the gas thing from inside the trunk, and everything’s good. But look what happens when you don’t get gas for three months:
Stinging beasties have babies in your car.
Monday I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about how snakes move. They only run one picture, which meant we couldn’t use this awesome shot of a snake sewn into a little cloth jacket. Doesn’t the snake look perky? It’s all, “Hey, guys! I’m in a jacket! What’s up?”
The study was figuring out how snakes have different friction in different directions – they’re more frictiony toward the back than the front, so they can slide forwards. The jacket was to even out the friction. If you put a snake in a jacket and you put it on a table covered in cloth, it can’t get a grip to slither forwards; it just squirms around. But it looks stylin’!
photo credit: Grace Pryor and David Hu
Alan Mairson, a writer who left National Geographic at the same time as me, has big ideas on how to do something about the Society’s problems. (Maybe also society’s problems, but he’s mostly talking about the Society for now.)
The idea is to use his new website, Society Matters, to unite people to do things like “crowdsourcing” and “beatblogging” – the internet is a bottomless well of new words – and come up with a way for the National Geographic Society to get its act together and find a way forward in this era of aging subscribers and plummetting ad revenue.
To which I say, Awriiight! Go Alan! I’ll be following along for sure. Because, really, it’s a pretty cool Society when you think about it. They fund research on underwater archaeology and mongoose diseases, for goodness’ sake.
I’ve been doing some work for a former employer ever since I left in 2007. It’s stuff I could perfectly well do at home, but…well, I was having trouble motivating to do it at home. So I asked if I could go in for a couple of days, and they set me up with an office. I went in for two days this week.
It was actually really nice to go in and see people. There are some I’m in touch with, but I’m not in touch with, for example, Vince the mailroom guy. I went out to lunch with colleagues, and I actually had friends to go say hi to when I needed a break! At home when I need a break, I can…uh…well, there’s always facebook.
I came back from lunch today and this was on my chair:
Yep. I’ve been gone for two years, and I’m still on hospital junk mail lists. (This made me laugh. I love that Vince dropped this off for me.)
