And I Think to Myself...What A Wonderful World.

New Pokemon Starter Fun Facts! + Hello again!

2016-05-10T23:28:00.003-07:00

It's been a while.

At first, I wanted to do more Jurassic World: the Game. I had a nice list of my favorites...but they added more, and the list changed.

So, what brought me back? Sun and Moon starters. Yes, Pokemon is my drug, at least in part due to its creature designs. Although the creativity off Gen VI was severely lacking (the Starters were way too repetitive for my tastes), the news of Gen VII's starters and Legends merits an entry of its own.

I don't have much to say on the Grass-Type owl, except "it's about darn time." Hoothoot and Noctowl have been the only owls in the Pokemon world for a long time. Owls spend a decent amount of time in trees, so Grass/Flying? Why not? Kinda wish more Pokemon used logic like that.

Source: Serebii.net. Official art.

Now, things get interesting with Litten. For the unaware, there's been a theory that all the Fire-Type Starter Pokemon follow the theme of Chinese zodiac animals. So far, in order, we have a dragon (Charmander), monotreme "mouse" (Cyndaquil), chicken/rooster (Torchic), monkey (Chimchar), pig (Tepig), and...canine (Fennekin). While the Chinese zodiac does have a cat in its lore (as anyone into Fruits Basket knows), Litten is almost certainly our tiger as well.

I sense nitpicking. After all, not all striped cats are tigers, regardless of what the cats themselves have to say on the matter. Who's to say that this isn't a normal tabby cat, right?

The designers. No, really, there's a sneaky design hint that we're looking at a tiger in the making rather than your average tabby cat. You probably didn't even notice it unless you're from Asia already, or really into cats. You ready? Look at the mark on Litten's forehead.

Just look at it.

You done? Okay.

While we may think of both tigers and tabbies as striped cats, one of the least noticeable ways in which they are different involves the marking on their foreheads. A tabby cat has a distinct "M," which monotheistic religions usually cite as some type of divine blessing. A tiger has the symbol for "king." Have I mentioned before that the tiger is the king of beasts in China? While we could argue that the marking is still incomplete, the horizontal stripes versus the zig-zagging M is uncanny.

Source: NPS.gov

This isn't the only thing that fans missed. A lot of people glossed over that Popplio is not a seal - it is a sea lion. Despite having a Pokemon named "Sealeo" and Seel having flippers similar to those of a sea lion, we never had a sea lion Pokemon until this point. In a nutshell, seals are more marine (barely able to move on land, no ear flaps) while sea lions are more amphibious. The pinnipeds you see balancing balls are usually sea lions, not seals! What a clever idea for an amphibious Water-Type!

The lunar bat for Moon is awesome. Looks like the world's largest microbat - the kind of bat that has huge ears and uses echolocation. At the same time, I'd love a flying fox. I'd like every species on the planet to get its own Pokemon. Still a gorgeous, if impractical, design.

Source: KPBS.org

Finally, yes, white lions exist. Though rare, they can be found in the Kruger and Timbavati reserves in South Africa. You can go squee about Kimba being real, now.

Jurassic World, Part 2: Is the Game Better Than the Movie? and I-Rex VS Mewtwo.

2015-11-07T11:27:00.001-08:00

“…here we are, hunter-gatherers wandering among the wreckage of our own making, and evolved to play with evolution.” - George Gessert, “Why I Breed Plants.”

So, I mentioned last section that I’ve been playing Jurassic World: the Game. I love this game to death, and actually think it’s better than the movie.

I know, I know: I speak madness, this is Sparta, GET REKT. Hear me out.

One of the things I really hated about the movie was how forced a lot of the things felt. For a few examples: “FAMILY IS THE BEST THING EVER EVEN THOUGH I’M AT A DIVORCE HEARING,” “Remember that one time we made out? Yeah, we’re a couple, now,” “WE’RE KIDS LET’S BE REBELLIOUS AND STUPID!” (more on this later), “weaponize all the things” (more on this later, too), and, most importantly, “TAKE THAT, YOU GENETIC FREAK! Whaddya mean, ‘I’m just as spliced?!’”

That last one is not only the main point of this article, but also one of the main points of Jurassic Park as a whole: how far can science go before its wax wings melt?

This is where the game really stands out. Aside from more character development and more dinosaurs overall, I have to mention how the designs really made the whole point about wax wings better than the movie. It did that mostly by having more dinosaurs, allowing us to interact with said dinosaurs, and doing slightly different things with them.

For example, in the movie, we see raptor training. Vic Hoskins, a person working with both InGen and the military, mentions weaponizing the raptors, suggesting them as mine-sniffing dogs with talons among other things. Hoskins also suggests selectively breeding raptors for loyal strains. In the end, the training/conditioning wins out, but here’s the kicker: there is nothing wrong with selective breeding, especially for loyalty/docility. What’s wrong, really, is the military’s intent for such a thing.

You do realize he was selectively-bred, right?

Get this: the domestication of the dog predates the invention of the wheel. Dogs have been confirmed man’s best friend since 15,000 BCE; the wheel was invented around 3,500 BCE. It has been proven, multiple times, that not only are dogs and wolves the same species, but that all you have to do to make a wolf into a dog is select the brood for tameness. In foxes, this took only four generations; in wolves, with how similar their social structure is to that of humans, it may have taken even fewer than that. For the record, feral dogs have reverted almost entirely into wolves, yes. They’re called dingoes.

Imagine doing that with raptors. Wouldn’t that be AWESOME? Since this type of breeding also creates new patterns (specifically piebaldism - irregular white patches on a creature’s coat), we could have a variety of raptors tailored to the demands of anybody with the time and money for a pet raptor! Want one with a nifty stripe like Blue? You got it. An all-white one? Doable. Orange? Sure, why not!

And y’know what? The game actually encourages this.

Image from the JW Wikia, but I have one, too.

JW the Game has an arena function. In order to get stronger dinos, you have to fuse two of them together. The results lead to cleaner patterns and brighter colors, similar to the selectively-bred Okeetee corn snakes (they are not a heritable morph - they are “cleaned” wild-colored corn snakes). The tradeoff is camouflage for a pattern that rakes in the dough. All you have to do is mate/evolve your dinosaurs. It’s no worse than trying to select for, say, deeper purple in albino reticulated pythons, along with a good temperament. Always go for temperament.

“But that’s unnatural!”

No, no it isn’t. Allow me to elaborate on why it is perfectly fine using “fuck” in every sentence with several different meanings.

Nature does not fucking care what humans do to its creatures. As long as things are fucking and their offspring continue to fuck, the species survives. Mother Nature is a fucking bitch; as long as you fuck and your offspring can fuck, you win. It doesn’t matter if a fucking wolf does it with a fucking dog- humans are the ones who care. As far as the wolfdog is concerned, it is still Canis fucking lupus, and can still fuck either of its parents while producing offspring that can fuck. That is how animals fucking win. That is all that fucking matters to nature: fucking.

What is unnatural is that male dinosaurs aren’t fucking acknowledged. We don’t even know if there’s a fucking stud, who, by the way, must be doing a lot of fucking if he exists. If anything, preventing the dinosaurs from fucking naturally like that is more unnatural than selectively breeding them. At least with selective breeding, there is fucking going on.

I’m done with the F-bombs, now. Hopefully, they make the point. Your move, Catcher in the Rye.

The problem: even selective breeding, an art as old as humankind, has very bad connotations, nowadays. PETA has made sure that selective breeding is linked with puppy mills, cross-eyed white tigers, and generally illegal activities. This is not to say that such things don’t happen at all with inbreeding, or that puppy mills are A-OK, but it is still an art almost as old as humanity itself, and will not go away. Generally speaking, humans move forward with their inventions, not backwards. This applies to breeding, too; for example, Siamese cats have had the exact same issues with crossed eyes as white tigers in the past (it’s the same type of albinism, even), but selective breeding, including outcrosses, overcame that hurdle. We’re generally pretty good at picking out traits we like and accentuating them without causing too much damage - i.e. making it so that the organisms can’t fuck.

Refer back to the quote we opened with: we have evolved to play with evolution. Selective breeding is selecting for traits we like, rather than being stronger or faster. Considering that humans can be treated as their own extinction event, perhaps it’s about time we looked at selective breeding as its own, bizarre adaptation: a genetic response to a new environment. In this case, that new environment is us.

So, again, let’s loop back to something I said in the beginning: part of the point of Jurassic Park is a sort of “wax wings of Icarus - don’t fly too close to the sun/play God” analogue. While we could argue that Indominus rex makes the point pretty clear by herself, might the game actually make it better?

A liger, bred for its skills in AWESOME.

Hybrids, in general, are a sort of breaking point for humans as far as science is concerned. You can mate a lion and a tiger, for example, making a liger, but the liger is going to have a few problems. For one, they suffer a lot of the same issues as large dog breeds; because the growth inhibition gene in lionesses is not at all present in ligers, they grow huge, to the point where their hearts literally cannot support them. Female ligers can indeed reproduce, but males are almost certainly sterile. Sterility happens rather frequently in hybrids, and remember our golden rule: Fuck. Once you can’t reproduce well, Nature herself flips you off as a species. This isn’t even touching sci-fi splicing; sometimes, crossing two things is enough to make Nature go “yeah, NO.” (Also, to preemptively cut off any anti-gay stuff? This has to happen to an entire species, and nature always has a few individuals that won't pass on their genes.)

Before I go into how JW: the Game shows this better than the movie, I’d like to talk about Mewtwo.

Scan from Bulbapedia. Should've just used mine.

For those of you who do not know who or what Mewtwo is, you’re either really old or are not from this planet. I will nonetheless explain.

Mewtwo is a Pokemon created from a single bit of DNA from Mew, said to be the progenitor of all Pokemon-kind, and Arceus knows what else. In its PokeDex entries, it is said to have been created by a scientist “after years of horrific gene splicing and DNA-engineering experiments.” Things like having the “most savage heart among Pokemon” and thinking only of combat also come up repeatedly. And yet…

…there are a few reasons that people are not piss-shit terrified of Mewtwo. No, if anything, Mewtwo is regarded as the only 100% badass Pokemon - even by people who are not fans of Pokemon. A lot of this has to do with how Mewtwo was softened as a character for the first Pokemon movie; watch the Japanese movie and/or the dubbed “Birth of Mewtwo,” and see exactly how anthropomorphized and softened the “most savage heart” became.

Mewtwo was designed, from an artistic standpoint, to be a freak; like, seriously, that neck tube looks wrong. So was Indominus rex. Both are intelligent, cold-hearted, ruthless in battle, and meant to look like bastardizations of nature. They nonetheless are marketable badasses.

Is it any wonder that this thing got the most merch?

(Also, you aren’t marketing the hell out of something being a blend of T-Rex and raptor…why? “Part T-Rex. Part raptor. ALL AWESOME.” Also also, no, albinos are not scary; if anything, white and melanistic animals make things even more of an attraction! (See also: white tigers, black “panthers,” and NOLA’s white alligator.) Now fire your entire marketing department and anyone who kept THOSE TWO GENES a secret. The rest…people won’t care after that, trust me.)

What the movie didn’t tell us was that there were more fused dinosaurs besides Indominus. Some of them, like the Stegoceratops, also got toys, despite not being in the movie. Others, though…

This is Koolasaurus, the only fused amphibian in the game, but I'm pretty sure Pepe the frog has more reasons to live.

I’m gonna throw it out there that the JW game doesn’t do enough with pterosaurs (or amphibians, for that matter). No long-tailed pterosaurs until the Dimorphodon update really stunted the potential for a giant, beaky wyvern-splicer. The fused monster (yes, only one fused pterosaur) for them simply looks like…nothing compared to the phoenixian Lv. 40’s until it fully evolves. All splicers start out with this pink-grey mush color to them, while the selectively-bred parent species look like something out of Avatar. It’s a kinda-dinosaur molded out of clay versus a living work of modern art.

But oh, no. You look at the other two crosses of what should be badass dinosaurs, and things start looking so much worse.

I'll give you the crack, okay? By the way, I don't own any of these caps because I'm not cool enough.

I am, of course, talking about the Spinoraptor and Carnoraptor. One of these barely has feathers and has huge, pink, bulging eyes with tiny pupils, like some sort of dinosaur drug addict. The other has the cool horns of a Carnotaurus…stunted into little demonic nubs, along with wrinkly skin like on a shrunken head and black, beady eyes. If Indominus was not enough of an indication that insane splicing was not the answer, oh my gods, look at her creepy as hell siblings.

Indominus kinda beat us over the head with “this is WRONG” while looking completely badass - just like Mewtwo. Her possessed siblings do so in a much more subtle and chilling manner. That is art.

Now that's more like it!

Granted, the evolved hybrids look a lot cooler. The gray mush of Tropeogopterus becomes just as bold as any other pterosaur, and even if Carnoraptor and Koolasaurus look just as freaky as before, it’s an improvement over the color gray. Evolve anything but Indominus, and it looks decent (red stripes and spikes...yawn). So, what else does the game do that the movie doesn’t?

Pretty much just generic kids in the movie. Not so in the game.

At this point, I’m going to bring up the two kids. Zach, the older brother, is a techie; he reminds me a lot of my (younger) nephew in that he’s concerned about things regarding technology, and is the type of kid who freaks when a place has no cell phone reception (which I think he got from his mom, but I digress). Gray, the younger kid, is into things like science and math, and is just giddy to see dinosaurs and be out in nature. Although these sides of these characters were probably in the movie on some level, I think one exchange really hammers in the key difference between the two:

Zach: This is awful! There’s no cell phone reception!

Gray: I know, isn’t it great?

That bit, right there, cements these two as characters. (It also proves that the people who made Gray’s character really don’t know anything about how modern kids act, but more on that later.) It’s not verbatim, but the exchange really stuck out. Zach’s character is consistently tech-oriented, while Gray is an absolute geek about the natural world. The movie focuses on the sibling relationship between these two, which, while realistic, feels cheap and forced in places (“Y U NO BOND WITH CLAIRE?!”). They could’ve had something more interesting and insightful if they had given the two more traits (or emphasized extant traits) beyond “they’re brothers; the younger kid likes dinosaurs, older brother is borderline stupid and generally a rebellious teenager.”

I would like to note that the Wikia says absolutely nothing about Zach’s character and a lot about Gray’s character. I’ll get into why this matters in a bit.

While it wasn’t necessarily crystalline in the movie, in the game, these kids are really, really symbolic in a way that doesn’t beat you over the head…as much as the movie did in spots with different characters. Look at that dialogue I pasted up there, and the purpose of these two siblings suddenly becomes clear: Zach is obsessed with technology and would probably die without his phone, while Gray is a junior paleontologist. These two are extreme representations of nature VS technology, with Gray being nature boy and Zach being glued to his phone. Even their names hint at this if you squint.

Now, mind, they are still characters. They are also still older and younger siblings. For example, the Wikia describes Gray as a little bit hyper, and getting on Zach’s nerves from time to time. Zach nonetheless tries to keep a reign on his little brother, even if he has a rebellious side himself.

Um, question: why not switch these two? I don’t really object to the younger sibling being aligned with nature and the elder being concerned with his iPhone, but symbolism aside, which is more realistic? Drawing from my own relatives, I know the opposite from experience: the older brother is more concerned with math and science and is a Boy Scout, and the younger one wants his tablet PC, his dad’s phone, or really, any screen to stare at and tap on. Kids these days are growing up with devices that their older siblings never encountered; it would make a lot of sense for a kid in that day and age to be tired of dinosaurs, which have been “normal” for much of his life, while the older sibling is more concerned with not only the names, but the processes that created them to begin with, as well as the older Jurassic Park. It would also make more sense for the younger sibling to be more hyperactive not just because he's a little kid, but because he’s grown up in a world that encourages technological ADD (which I have STRONGLY experienced with a friend’s little brother).

Now, here’s why they didn’t do that: Gray is not only symbolic of nature, but also of the Jurassic Park fanbase. Really into dinosaurs? Check. Kinda knows when things are about to go wrong, sort of like an animal sense? Check. Knows stuff about the old park? Oho, checkaroonie. Again, though - wouldn’t this make more sense on the older brother?

The world as most humans know it.

Maybe, maybe not. It’s a sad fact of American culture that adults usually aren’t into nature. The mature world of man is not a world of wild animals - it’s a world of metal and people on their phones on a constant basis. In the adult mind, humans have exceeded nature already, and don’t really see it as a threat. People who really like animals tend to be more in-tune with their inner child, so I can see why the writers did what they did with these characters.

In short: while I don’t entirely agree with the positions of younger and elder siblings, I respect the creators’ choices. It just could have been more powerful if this had been fleshed out, and maybe switched. I do mean “fleshed out” and not “beaten into our skulls,” the latter of which ironically makes things less effective.

In the end, the two siblings have to settle their differences and work things out in order to avoid being eaten by Mewtwosaurus. The humans eventually sic the natural (but still very spliced) dinosaurs on the freak they have created, and win out by playing off of both conditioning and natural behavior. In other words, a compromise between tech and nature was reached. We've evolved to play with evolution, but that doesn't mean we control it entirely, nor does it mean that we won't make icky-looking mistakes.

While the movie does make the point of wax wings on its own, it feels like the game does it better. It doesn’t beat you over the head, lets you interact more with the dinosaurs than humans we are supposed to like (even then, Blue the raptor is the best character in the movie), and actually teaches you, the player, more things than the movie ever did without you realizing it. Nostalgia Critic was completely right in that the movie should maybe have been more about cool dinosaurs doing cool dinosaur things than about forced stereotypes, whether girls can ever have it all or not, and not-at-all subtle callbacks to the first movie (Jaws was very cleverly inserted, though). It’s still worth seeing, so go ahead and give it a watch - and then go play the game on your tablet or phone. If nothing else, it’s a fitting complement to a decent flick.

Welcome to Jurassic World (Part 1): Stop Hating on Kermit!

2015-10-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

e been playing waaaaay too much Jurassic World: the Game. No, that isn’t the reason I haven’t updated anything. That, well, I might be moving my blog to Tumblr, or at least another account. We’ll see, but it's pretty likely that this will be a massive, three-part "grand finale" of sorts.

Anyways. Jurassic World. Fun ride of a movie, which is amusingly about an amusement park. I want to take a D-Rex home. Working on it in the game. D-Rex should have looked more freakish if they put cuttlefish in there - c’mon, at least give us the neat W-eye! My general thoughts on the movie will get their own blurb later. Also, for whatever reason, JW and JP both hate frogs, even though it’s probably entirely unwarranted.

Why? Because, from the get-go, dinosaurs could reproduce without a male.

Who's the man in this, again?

Read that sentence again.

Read that sentence three times if you have to. Let it sink into your brain: even without as much genetic meddling that Jurassic Park had, from the get-go, the potential for every dinosaur on the island to reproduce asexually, and then sexually.

Now, here’s my disclaimer: Crichton was largely using the frogs for genetic freak purposes. The whole point of Jurassic Park was that, maybe, there are some buttons science shouldn’t push. The frogs are the bad guys for art rather than any logical reason. I realize people back then didn’t know precisely how close birds were to dinosaurs, but there’s still no reason to use frogs other than HERPDERP SCIENCE EFFED UP. Use lizards. Or chickens. Science can get those very easily.

So, just how is this possible, anyways? What could prompt natural dinosaurs to reproduce without a male? It’s all genetic…as nature intended?!

I’m tempted to assume that most people reading this have taken basic biology in high school, sex ed, or both. All you really need to know for this is that human (and other mammal) females have XX sex chromosomes, and males have XY. Women are the only sex that could possibly reproduce without a male, but in mammals, that’s pretty much unheard of, and all of the offspring would be female clones of the mother.

That is not the case with the rest of non-mammals.

For many other creatures, including everything from butterflies (yes, butterflies are more like birds in this regard), to lobsters, to chickens, sex is determined by a system called “ZW.” What this means is that the males are ZZ (no, not ZZ Top, but if that helps you remember, go for it) and the females are ZW.

That thing, with the females having two different letters (heterozygous), changes everything. Parthenogenesis, AKA “virgin birth” if you’re not a fan of Greek, occurs with a female egg effectively impregnating itself. It has been known to occur in lizards (most notably whiptail lizards, who are only female, and Komodo dragons), snakes (boas, Burms, and Brahminy blind snakes - again, that last one is only female) and a special breed of turkey literally bred because people thought this parthenogenesis thing was just too darn cool. No, chickens laying eggs by themselves doesn’t count; the eggs you buy at the grocery store are effectively chicken periods. Enjoy your Dunkin Donuts breakfast sandwich!

ZW animals can produce parthenogenically by either all-out cloning or half-cloning. A full clone is exactly that: a perfect clone of the mother. The half-cloning, however, includes only half of mom’s genes - twice over. For ZW, that means one letter gets repeated.

Umm...girls? Your lesbian sex is legal, now. Everywhere.

Remember what’s special about ZW: the male has ZZ. Through half-cloning, a mother lizard can create an entire clutch of males. They’re almost identical to her in every way except sex. Then, they can just go ahead and do it again with mom, or maybe even the odd WW females. ZZ Top will always be male. I’m sure they’re thrilled to be in a lesson about dinosaur sex.

Parthenogenesis gets less frequent down the evolutionary “line,” but it’s not like dinosaurs grew out of it. If you must make evolution linear, dinosaurs are like a link between reptiles and birds. We’ll get to crocodiles; for now, well, birds are capable of it, too.

BUT…they’re not as good at it.

Parthenogenesis in birds usually results in duds. Either the eggs aren’t quite fertile, embryos die early, or the offspring have reduced fertility. An exception occurs in turkeys, who, for reasons not entirely clear, have mastered the art of giving birth without a dad. These are all ZZ males, who have then been rebred to virgin-birthing females in order to create a more stable strain, and eventually a breed. These ZZ Toms (the joke will not die as I write it!) are almost indistinguishable from your average turkey.

If half-female, half-male chickens are possible...imagine a raptor like that.

This is just the tip of the genetic weirdness iceberg possible without the frog. ZW is also capable of the weird chimerism called “bilateral gynandromorphy,” in which individuals are literally half female and half male. (XY can also do this, but very rarely.) Also, what if, like crocodilians (read: other archosaurs) dinosaurs had temperature-determined sex determination? I realize Crichton was using the frogs for freak’s sake, but the poor frog seems to be the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in that world. Give other animals a chance.

Member's Night Special: Pokemon in Science!

2015-05-17T08:20:00.003-07:00

Hello, it's been a while. Again, I keep intending to post things and never getting around to it. This, however, was too awesome not to post.

Go back through my blog archives. Find the "Who's That Pokemon?" tag. Now, imagine getting up close and personal with some of those creatures.

That was my idea for this year's Members' Night at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. Mind, our choices were limited to reptiles and amphibians (I do work in herps, after all), but it was still a fun set up. We will definitely be doing it next year, too, possibly with a few modifications!

Now, I have to admit that the flyers were a little misleading. Initially, we had planned for both more Pokemon and live animals (leopard gecko, tiger salamander, and/or Pudge the Frog - a painted narrowmouth toad (Kaloula picta)). I made fanmade Pokemon for the setup, which will be available for viewing on my DeviantArt account (kurokarasu.deviantart.com). For now, though, let's focus on the setup itself and some of the critters covered on it.

First off, I'd like to apologize for the relatively narrow spectrum, again. For those of you who got the guide, I'm sorry that we didn't have room for Tyranitar, who makes an awesome armadillo lizard, as well as a few other Pokemon we talked about in the ad, but simply couldn't include. The setup still got plenty of attention (nothing quite got my own ear like when a kid walking by yelled "Pokemon!" - that happened a lot), so we did some things right. (I had to correct the setup above, by the way: Tirtouga is the Archelon, Squirtle's kind of a sea turtle like that hawksbill, and that is definitely a Torkoal shell, up there.)

See those critters in baggies? That's what we do in the lab when we don't want to use jars to send things. I got to heat-seal some of these, and they encouraged more interaction with the animals than just having them in glass jars.

I didn't take a photo of this, but one of the stars of the show was a preserved axolotl. For the uninformed, the Pokemon Wooper's name comes from the Japanese word for the axolotl, "wooper looper." Pick your favorite funny-sounding word for the eternally-young, indestructible salamander!

One of the more creative displays from the older staff was a section on Haunter and a cleared and stained horned lizard. Although the idea was the creepiness of the transparent body, it's always worth mentioning that the horned lizard cries high-pressure blood at its enemies. Emos, meet your spirit animal. Alas, I apparently didn't get a good photo of this on my digital camera.

It's hard to say which of these three displays is my baby. Anyone who's known me for a long time knows that I have a huuuuge thing about Serperior being a Baron's Racer (Philodryas baroni), but will not deny that there's probably vine snake in there. The habu and Draco maximus up there were really well-selected, though; if you look carefully on the habu, you can even see its fangs.

Overall, this exhibit was just a ton of fun to design! Two teachers want me to design Pokemon-based lesson plans for their kids, and since ACen hit yesterday (and okay, fine, today) as well, I'm tempted to do a panel on Pokemon as it relates to natural science. It's not something a lot of people think about, and seems to be a hit on more than one front.

Happy Year of the Sheep! The Bezoar Goat.

2015-02-20T21:41:00.001-08:00

Happy Chinese New Year, everybody! What better way to start off the Year of the Goat…Sheep…Geep? with a goat? Just look at this thing:

Source.

That goat is called a bezoar goat/ibex (Capra aegagrus aegagrus), and it is the stuff Gogoats (it's year of the Wood Goat, by the by) are made of. It's native to the Middle East, including Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan - all those fun places! There are a few places where it's been introduced, but what you really need to know is that this:

…came from this:

Source.

Although nobody's really sure how much the bezoar goat contributed to the domestic goat gene pool, it's either a direct descendant or a hefty percentage. Along with making them smaller and tame, bezoar goats lost their razor-sharp horns, gained curly tails, and now, some breeds have floppy ears. Also, some of them have been bred to faint, but that's not the fault of a goat with razor horns. Yeah, goat horns used to have a sharp, inner edge like a badass sword.

Bezoar goats are very well adapted to mountainous, sometimes cold regions. At night, the temperature of places like Turkey sometimes drops drastically; wool is a good countermeasure to that. A goat's feet are also spongy and relatively narrow, allowing them to climb around in rocky areas. Have I sung the praises of those beautiful horns enough? No? Well, those are both sexy (to other goats, mind) and a great defense mechanism.

At this point, some of you are probably wondering: isn't a "bezoar" something out of Harry Potter? Yes, and it does indeed come from a goat…or any other number of things, really. A bezoar is basically a stone of miscellany that didn't get digested, and thus wound up lodged in an animal's digestive tract. Goats are far from the only animals that have them; humans can get bezoars as well. Their poison-curing properties are greatly exaggerated, with only curing arsenic poisoning anywhere near consistently (and only with treatment).

Oh, right, back on the topic of the wild goat. Another nasty thing that happens with domestication is the relative scarcity of the wild counterpart. The bezoar is technically only "Threatened," and then mostly due to habitat loss. Game hunting of these goats has also increased. Wolves and the aurochs are so very, very jealous right now, regardless.

You Shouldn't Eat That: Flamboyant Cuttlefish.

2014-11-25T15:46:00.002-08:00

I should really do more of these. The internet is a wonderful place, bombing us with weird nature facts all the time. In particular, I'm a fan of the work of Zefrank1 on YouTube. Here, have one of his videos on cuttlefish:

For those of you who are not already aware, cuttlefish are total bosses. Along with octopus and squid, they rank among the smartest of mollusks. Their brains are larger than their bodies - referring to the squishy 'head' and tentacles, in case you were confused exactly how that works. Also, their amazingly sharp eyes look like someone's marbles that got lost in the ocean. If need be, they can, like squid, jet themselves away from danger. They are masters of changing color and texture to blend in anywhere - even in darkness that the human eye cannot see.

And then there is this thing:

Credit to Monterey Bay Aquarium for the image.

It's called a flamboyant cuttlefish, or Pfeffer's flamboyant cuttlefish (Metasepia pfefferi) if you wanna give credit where credit is due. It's found in the warmer waters of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia (which should just start advertising itself as real World of Warcraft already - oh, and no respawn). Like all cuttlefish, it is predatory, eating things like crab and fish. Since this is a very small cuttlefish - only about 3 inches long - it only eats very small things.

Again, I'm sure I've done things on cuttlefish before, but it's been a while. Normally, cuttlefish hover above coral or whatever their prey happens to be on. They can do that because of the thick, inner shell called a cuttlebone that helps with buoyancy. The flamboyant cuttlefish has a proportionately tiny cuttlebone, meaning that it can only stay afloat for a short time.

Without that cuttlebone to keep it afloat like a UFO, what does it do? It struts around like a dinosaur on the bottom of the ocean floor while tasting the rainbow. This...is not camouflage. We humans think it's amusing that anything walks like people, or even tries to, but being bipedal and flashy on the sands of the ocean floor is not a survival strategy in and of itself.

So, let's recap: this thing is tiny, cannot swim well, eats whatever small thing it can find, changes color, has a brain bigger than the rest of its body...and yet it waltzes around like nothing on earth is going to hurt it. (Disclaimer: the writer is not factoring in alien species, and cuttlefish are darn close to aliens.) What's the catch?

For once, it's okay to be purple.

It is terrifyingly poisonous.

I've heard and read mixed things about cephalopods being poisonous in general. The video I linked above, for example, mentions that all cephalopods have some level of venom. They do, from what I can tell, but in most cases, it's not at all threatening to humans. The flamboyant cuttlefish will actually kill you if you eat it. It is on par with the blue-ringed octopus in terms of how poisonous it is. By this, I mean it'll kill you dead in a matter of minutes if you catch it on a bad day. Eating one is always a bad day.

Did I mention that cuttlefish, including these flamboyant ones, sometimes use their colorful, magical powers to 'crossdress?' Sort of like with anacondas, the female cuttlefish mate with many males at a time, and some smaller males sneak into the orgy by pretending to be females. Bring that up at Valentine's Day (or Turkey Day) and see how many people you impress.

Creature Design Post: Poison Running Through My Veins.

2014-09-30T22:48:00.001-07:00

First off, I apologize for updating this less frequently. The biggest factor, by far, is my own moving away from my old e-mail account, and therefore my Blogger. It's not like my interest in life has been demolished, I've just been lazy about switching accounts. There were also a lot of trips in September!

I've also been thinking about a new type of article. See, this blog started with the intent of being inspiration food. I'm a huge fan of creature designs, to the the point where they tend to overwhelm other parts of my work. I love monsters, especially ones that a) eat people and b) derive from nature. The way I see it, I may as well tell the world more about what I like using examples from both nature and other media. I want to inspire people using everything nature and art has to offer.

In particular, I love animals that use poison! Goodness knows why, but I find it a very interesting, unique bioweapon. It's usually a "big things come in small packages" deal that sometimes even looks cool. Thus, it kinda cheeses me off when people just palette swap a creature and say one color is poisonous without taking in other structural ideas.

So, without further ado…three tips for designing your own toxic beasts!

If this thing was a Pokemon, I'd catch the hell out of it. And it's invasive, so that would be okay.

1. Picking Your Poison.

Or, if you prefer, "the nitty-gritty details- how and why?"

I apologize for starting with something so boring. However, it is a rather important part of why certain animals have poison while others do not, and help you, as a designer, gauge how poisonous a creature should be. Aside from the aesthetic of a poisonous thing, why something is poisonous should be the first things you think about.

The truth is, that's how you have to think of poison. A toxin is not a horn or claw. It's not visually appealing in and of itself. Whereas one can easily brush off a horn as, say, a mating display, one cannot do that for poison. Poison has to have a bigger point than that.

So, why does your thing have poison? Is it hunting prey, or just defending itself? While poison's a pretty versatile weapon, this will affect your design. The rule of thumb is that venomous creatures use their poison to hunt, while poisonous creatures use it as a defense. What kind of animal are you making?

Nobody ever suspects...the BUTTERFLY!

Probably the most classic poisonous animal to pick on is the monarch butterfly. The caterpillar of the monarch butterfly eats milkweed, a mildly toxic plant. By doing so, the caterpillar itself becomes bad-tasting, and birds learn to avoid them from that point on. The butterflies are likewise poisonous, and the circle of life continues when they pollinate the poisonous milkweed. A lot of prey animals do this - even the notorious poison dart frogs, which eat toxic beetles to make themselves toxic. Very, very toxic, in fact.

Venomous creatures are another can of worms. A venomous creature is usually a slower predator, often of the ambush variety, that naturally makes its own toxins. It is usually well-camouflaged, sporting a swift strike. This thing is definitely poisoning to kill, meaning that one strike should hurt a lot. Bad taste won't cut it, even if it is still considered toxic. Venomous creatures like our lionfish (from the start of the article) are both predator and prey, thus the vibrant markings.

Why things do not have poison is just as important as why things do have poison. For example…ever wonder why there are so few poisonous mammals known to science?

Put bluntly: they don't need it. Why invest in poison when you have massive teeth, claws, hooves, or long legs? Mind, there are a few oddball mammals that still have poison, but there's a reason that they are exceptions rather than the rule. For example, a toxic lion would be redundant; one, they aren't prey for anything, two, cats kill with a death-bite to the neck.

Here are a few reasons why something might evolve poison: it's slow; it's small; it doesn't have sharp claws, wings, or horns to defend itself. The vast majority of poisonous mammals are shrews, i.e. small furry things, or shrew-like solenodons; in a remarkable display of sadism for such small creatures, shrews use venom to render prey comatose while they cache it for winter. Solenodons have it because they are the closest mammalian things to reptiles after monotremes, and simply saw no need to evolve out of their toxic fangs.

Solenodons are weird, by the way. T-Rex would have seen this guy!

Most mammals have claws, fangs, or massive size that they can use to their advantage. They don't need to slowly weaken things. They don't even need toxic skin to defend themselves. It's the smaller, slower, more vulnerable animals that are more likely to have poison. If you can't cause a lot of damage or run like the wind already, you might just be a good candidate for toxins.

And then, oh, the plethora of toxins out there. There are toxins that paralyze, toxins that cause internal bleeding, toxins that attack muscle, and that's just naming a few. It's not simple to create an antidote for every venom out there, just because of the variety. I could stress again and again that these things tend to be tiny, yet potent, so whichever route you design best be worth it.

Of course, when you're making man-eaters, tiny is not an option. Slow is also usually a pretty bad idea, but toxins can still compensate like they do in nature. Monster Hunter has my eternal respect for having several very well-designed poisonous beasts in a number of regards. My personal favorites of MH 3 Ultimate, Lucent Nargacuga and Gigginox, are both venomous, but Gigginox is a real gem. It's slow, blind, breeds more than rabbits, and flings poison lugies at you. Perhaps size aside, it's one of the best-designed toxic creatures ever!

Or you could just go, "here's a thing, here's that thing again, only purple. The purple one is poisonous." Ah, recolors - the bane of my existence in cases like this.

2. It's All in the Delivery.

Here's another bugger concerning poisonous critters: how do you get your poison in?

The evolution of venom in snakes is a long and hole-filled one. We do not know when or how lizards went from having four legs to none, whether it was related to water or earth, or if those lizards were poisonous. We also don't know how certain lizards evolved poison, or if any snakes can truly, 100% be called "nonvenomous." Science is still split on the Komodo dragon, but poison or bacteria, a bite from that thing is deadly.

What we do know, however, is that the poison glands in snakes evolved long before they had the fangs to properly inject the stuff. Duvernoy's gland, the sac that produces venom, is found in seemingly harmless colubrids. There are also snakes dubbed "rear-fanged venomous."

Yes. Let's talk about those for a bit.

Rattler left, cobra right.

If one looks at the skull of a rattlesnake or cobra, one will notice two very obvious things: one, the skulls have very different styles of fangs, meaning that the images of cobras with massive fangs are really a load of BS; two, despite the differences between the fangs, they are both situated towards the front of the mouth. This only makes sense; after all, where better to put a weapon for injecting poison into prey?

The venom-injecting fang did not start there. Evolution is an awkward mistress who tends to make a ton of mistakes before getting it right. The injection fang was situated towards the eye, closer to the gland, before the efficient venomous snakes we know today. These snakes still have and make poison, but can't get it into a squirming, potentially biting, kicking prey item.

The boomslang - embarrassingly known better as a Harry Potter potions class ingredient than a snake that can kill you by opening its mouth 180 degrees.

This says nothing about how lethal the poison is, just that it's harder to get into a nice, warm rodent. Pretty crazy tricks have to be done just to get the point across (ha ha) if the machinery isn't there. The boomslang is one of the more noteworthy rear-fanged venomous snakes out there, but it doesn't have the huge fangs of a rattler, or even the fixed fangs of a cobra at the front of the mouth. It has three fangs for injecting venom, located right beneath Duvernoy's gland. It can almost open its jaws in a straight line in order to deliver its lethal bite; most rear-fanged snakes are not so lucky, and have to chew their venom into their prey to get it in at all.

This is, of course, largely concerning venom. When you're poisoning something to kill it, of course you want the most efficient delivery system possible. If the poison is defensive, however, chances are a predator will be doing half of your work for you - usually touching the skin. Both the pufferfish and poison dart frog varieties have this right, with the pufferfish sporting death needles and dart frogs having a coating so poisonous that merely touching it causes at least a tingle."Your mouth is on my skin- sucks to be you" is very different from sticking fangs into an unsuspecting mouse. Needles, spurs, and toxic coatings are all cool ways to go about it. Delivery isn't as big a problem when the pred's doing your work for you.

Point is, it doesn't matter how nasty your poison is if you can't get it in. It's like putting medicine in a bottle you can't open. In nature, there are no "much stronger people" who will open that bottle for you, so best make sure you can open it yourself.

3. Acid Trip!

Poisonous things can be among the most gorgeous beasts in the animal kingdom! A lot of poisonous (not always venomous) animals are very colorful as a warning, even though most of nature sees in black and white. Poison dart frogs are a classic example of this. Really, this guy blends in exactly nowhere:

The Frog Formerly Known As Azureus. He was never a Prince.

Dart frogs aside, nature has another warning method: stripes. There's a trinity of red, yellow, and black that can be found on a lot of poisonous animals, including coral snakes and wasps. One could even add skunks to the "stripy and kind of bad for you" pile. Even to black and white vision, the stripy pattern stands out. The fancy term is "aposematic coloration" for the things that just taste bad.

Then there are the posers.

For every genuinely toxic animal, there is at least one mimic- not usually venomous or poisonous, but darn if they don't dress the part. Coral snakes copy a far less deadly species (they're prey, too, remember?), but kingsnakes and milksnakes are known for mimicking the lethal coral snakes. ("Red next to yellow will kill a fellow, red next to black is a friend of Jack" stops once you cross the southern U.S. border, by the way.) There are several very good bee mimics, including the hummingbird moth. The mimic octopus steals from everybody, making anything else trying to copy a venomous creature a futile cosplay attempt by comparison:

(I'm poisonous! Really! I am ALL AND EVERY POISONOUS YOU WILL EVER KNOOOWWW!)

There is a visual aspect to poison, it just isn't necessarily purple. If anything, poison's colors are red, yellow, and black. RPG's have lied to you!

In conclusion...

...I hate palette swaps. And bad design that doesn't give a flip about how poison works in nature, or how to properly portray it aside from the color purple, but mostly, I don't like how people arbitrarily add poison onto anything without thinking about it. Pokemon and MonHunt have you beat already. There are a ton of creative ways to use poison.

Creature Feature: MONGOOSE!

2014-07-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Hawaii, right now. There is flora and fauna that I've never seen anywhere else everywhere. Oh, and I've also caught a few glimpses of a species that one does not expect to see in Hawaii: the mongoose.

Source.

How did I not do the mongoose before? Mongooses are weird little carnivores that are related to civets and hyenas- yeah, picture that family reunion for a sec. Like hyenas, they are more closely related to cats than dogs. Even the names "mongoose" and "ichneumon" are weird. Although the Indian grey mongoose is the most well-known, there are some 33-odd species of mongooses, including the meerkat- which I did cover a very long time ago. Mongoose species are native to Africa and southern Eurasia, including India.

Like the honey badger, the mongoose is a badass. Its greatest achievement is taking down cobras. Mongooses are so well-known for this that Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book (and the white man's burden) wrote "Rikki -Tikki-Tavi," an adorable little story about a mongoose saving a family of humans from a family of cobras. Seeing as mongooses are cute, fuzzy little things and cobras are cobras, it's obvious whom the audience will root for.

Nom nom nom nom nom....bring the kiddies.

There's a bit of conflicting evidence about whether mongooses are technically immune to cobra venom or not. Almost everybody will cite that the mongoose has a thicker hide than most fuzzy animals. Most people will also cite a chemical immunity to at least part of a cobra's venom. Regardless, there's not much a snake can do against a mongoose. It's really not a fair match.

This snake-killing reputation has gone so far that researchers will consciously ignore everything else in order to sic a mongoose on snakes. There were efforts to curb the Okinawan habu, another venomous snake, by introducing the mongoose. Instead, it turned out that the two species were not even active at the same time, so the mongooses helped themselves to the native bird life. This incident was so famous that it remains a roadshow staple, and even got woven into Pokemon's Zangoose and Seviper. Y'know, even though it was an epic failure.

Image cropped from a Bulbapedia scan. N.B.- Zangoose has Immunity, and an overall better stat spread than Seviper. Once again, this is not a fair match.

Speaking of epic fail, introducing a mongoose to an island for any reason is a bad idea 99% of the time. Even if your excuse is rodent or snake control, mongooses are versatile little buggers. They don't really look to kill snakes as much as honey badgers do; if there's easier prey, they'll take it. Although they can kill venomous snakes pretty easily, the same really goes for almost anything smaller than the mongoose. The Hawaiian o'-o', among other birds, fell prey to the mongoose because they had no defenses against any predators. They had originally been brought over to kill rats and other vermin, but screw that- those birds had nothing to protect them. It's like choosing from a pre-packaged steak or getting out there and shooting the cow yourself. Maybe people trying to control pests should think of things that way!

Thing is, Hawaii also has Stitch. Mongooses are pretty awesome, but Stitch is immune to everything but water. Game, set, match, mongoose.

[Unfortunately, I could not find an image of Stitch VS a mongoose. You'll have to use your imagination. ]

Creature Feature: Zorilla.

2014-05-31T22:26:00.000-07:00

You've all heard something like this before: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck." If something has all the makings of something you know, it probably is something you know. That's usually pretty good advice to follow.

The problem is, nature loves trolling us. There are nonpoisonous snakes that look like poisonous ones, spiders that look almost exactly like flowers, and hell, even butterflies that are really good at looking like dead leaves.

And then there are furry little animals that look like skunks and stink like skunks, but aren't really skunks:

This is a zorilla (Ictonyx striatus). It's a polecat (mustelid, similar to a ferret) native to most of Africa. It eats birds, rodents, eggs, lizards, and pretty much any running thing it can sink its pointy little teeth into. They can kill after only nine weeks of being in the world. For those of you who know Spanish, we realize zorillas look almost nothing like "little foxes" and almost everything like skunks.

Even though it's related to skunks about as much as sea otters are, the zorilla is a really, really good example of convergent evolution. Those black and white stripes warn of the exact same thing a skunk is known for: its stench. A zorilla will turn buttward before firing, so you've got fair warning. The musk is supposedly less pungent than the musk of a skunk; haven't gotten to try this one personally, sorry. Other people claim that its scent can be smelled up to half a mile away, making it the world's smelliest animal. Still, it's not a coincidence that the zorilla looks like a skunk mixed with a Petco ferret; striking markings aren't a good sign.

(No word on whether these guys make good pets or not, by the way.)

Zorillas are also very communicative animals. Along with turning their tails towards you before spraying, they will growl and scream before firing. Baby zorillas even have different cries for when mommy is there or not. It doesn't sound as complex as bird song, but still very neat.

The zorilla may not really be a skunk, but it does a darn good job posing as one. Hell, skunks aren't even in the same area, and the zorilla does the same thing. It's got its work cut out for it. So, umm, even though it's not really a skunk, can't we just call it even and treat it like one, anyways?

They Actually Eat That: Oysters.

2014-04-10T20:47:00.002-07:00

Well, it's been a while since I did this column! I recently got back from New Orleans, AKA "foodie heaven." It's the best place ever if you want to try something you have never eaten before. I looove crawfish, and had my first taste of creole, which is its own thing. Alligator meat is...where else? Florida? A few farms? Basically, New Orleans is not Chicago, which could only ever win awards for "most poisonous junk food." There's really good, unique stuff, there.

Oh, and oysters. I can say I've had oysters, now.

Oysters are everywhere in New Orleans. It's hard to walk down a street there without seeing at least one oyster bar, or at least someplace selling oysters, on your way. Oyster shells can be picked up off the ground, if you have a good eye. Bourbon and Royal Streets, both interesting in their own rights, have their fair share of oyster bars as well as other fun things to look at (every sin known to man and antique stores, respectively).

It's not that oysters are as unique as alligator meat, but, rather, that New Orleans has a lot of them. New Orleans is located right along an estuary - a place where fresh and saltwater mix. This creates a home so ideal for the eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) that several oyster reefs can be found right near New Orleans.

An oyster reef (or, confusingly, "oyster bar") is an area where successive generations of oysters thrive. There have been approximately 5,895 oysters recorded with in a single square yard of reef - that's 45 bushels, for the culinarily curious. Flatworms, small fish, and other molluscs all make their home in these massive oyster beds. Other things, such as cow-nose rays, also prey upon the oysters. There are plenty to go around, at least.

Source: Eatyourworld.com

So, how do they taste? It depends on how you eat them. If you coat them in butter, seasonings, or anything else, they'll almost inevitably taste like that dressing. It's a little hard to pick out the taste beneath that - I would call it more subtle than mussel. Eaten raw, they supposedly taste exactly like fresh and salt water - both at once. Eat them while you're in New Orleans, for sure.

A bonus point: raw oysters are a scientifically-proven aphrodisiac. Raw, and only raw, oysters, contain zinc and other minerals that boost sperm count. Casanova's secret is backed by scientific fact, so, while raw oysters sound good on a hot day anyways, don't be surprised to find more junk downstairs. If you feel the sudden urge to go down Bourbon St. after slipping in some raw oysters, nobody will blame you. I repeat: It is OK to have fun.

New Orleans has a lot of creative food options. That said, I still haven't gotten bold enough to try escolar, which I did an entry on a while back. It's illegal in a lot of places, but my favorite N'awlins sushi haunt (Ginger Lime - Google map it if you're there!) is not one of them.

NARBC Spring 2014!

2014-03-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

Confession time: The reason I've not been updating as much is simply because I've been using my other Gmail account more. Having both switchable at the ready is nice. Never fear; more entries are coming, and they'll be juicier and meatier than ever before!

This entry focuses on North American Reptile Breeders' Convention (NARBC) Spring 2014 (Mar 15-6). I love these - there's so much cool stuff to take photos of! These went on my Twitter (@kurokarasu), so some people got a live feed of this entry as it was being made. ;) Most things are way out of my price range, but there are also some really great bargains that remind one how expensive pet stores can be. You'll also see a lot of species that one would not ordinarily see, like...

...yes, that's a hognose (H. nasicus). They're really cool, little rear-fanged snakes that are only mildly venomous. Nobody has ever died from a hognose bite; the worst that's happened is an allergic reaction. I've complained about how hard they are to get in IL before, but all one really needs is a permit.

So, how can these people even touch poison dart frogs? Captive-bred poison dart frogs aren't poisonous. The poison needs a few things before it can activate: bacteria on the frog, UV light, and a certain species of insect. We can take that last one away, at least, meaning that these frogs are OK to handle. Still, wash your hands after handling. These are mostly display frogs, anyways.

Someone on my Twitter commented that these ball pythons (P. regius) were on the pricey side. Um...no, not for ball python morphs, they are not. Here are a few non-slashed (or very slightly discounted) ball python morphs for your gawking pleasure:

Yes, I deliberately took photos of acid trips for you. Bear in mind that your regular ball pythons (usually "loser males") can be purchased for 30-50 bucks from a reptile specialty store.

A leucistic rainbow boa! A shame it looks almost like every other white snake on the market. If there was any of the species' namesake iridescence in these guys, the light was not showing it well.

This is a legless lizard. It was hard to get a good look at its eyes, but several other features made me believe it anyways. I'd like to think someone at a reptile convention would correct the owner if he was BS'ing us.

Hypo Burms! One of them was sold as I was walking around. People acted like they were having trouble getting rid of them. Given the abundance of laws surrounding giant snakes, I understand why.

I absolutely love dwarf reticulated pythons! This picture also happens to be for science; I'm working on a paper concerning what makes for a good domesticated animal, and dwarf retics are actually a really good candidate for a domesticated snake. I asked if they retained their legendary intelligence (by snake standards) even when dwarfs; the seller said yes. Regardless, it was amazing to hold one of these beauties.

Finally, my own acquisition: A GFP axolotl! This little guy (or girl, we don't know) glows green under black light, just like a GloFish. His/her working name is "Fran," short for both "Frankenstein" and "Francesca/Francisco"- we aren't sure, yet. Once the little salamander grows a bit, the males get bulges near the base of the tail. We shall see!

Creature Feature: Thread Snakes.

2014-02-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

This picture is MINE...but was done with Field Museum equipment, and is for their use.

Now for something I actually did: This is the head of a silver snake (Leptotyphlops albifrons), a type of thread snake from Argentina. It took forever to get a picture this good! The (dead) specimen had curled such that the head was hard to spread flat, but great side shots like this were still possible. It even shows the cute white spot at the front of the snake - handy, since the tail and head look very much alike on thread snakes. Just one of the many interesting things one can do by volunteering at the Field Museum!

Thread snakes in general are pretty neat, too. There are a few different families of thread snake, but they have enough in common to comfortably be called the same thing and share an entry page. Collectively, are found almost everywhere except Europe and some of the colder parts of northern Asia. Seeing them at all is a problem; these are secretive, quiet creatures that live in the soil and under rocks. Prepare to get your hands dirty.

Thread snakes are also called "worm snakes" or "blind snakes," and with good reason. These snakes look like worms, if not burnt noodles. They are not slimy like worms; that should be your first clue if you happen to pick one up. As seen beneath a microscope, however, these snakes have scales, eyes, nostrils, and a spinal cord, just like every other snake in existence. All of them eat eusocial insects, particularly ants and termites, at all stages of life. Some may also be parthenogenic - capable of reproducing entirely without a male. More on that particular thread snake in another entry, though.

From National Geographic. Probably the only pic out there.

Thread snakes are the tiniest snakes in the world. The smallest snake currently on record is the Barbados thread snake (L.carlae). As the name implies, this species is only native to Barbados, an island in the Caribbean. It is so small that it feeds on termites and their larvae. The adult is small enough to, well, fit comfortably on a quarter. The snake may be on the verge of extinction due to habitat threat, but not very much is known about it at all. It was just discovered and identified in 2008, so give it a bit longer.

Oddly enough, these snakes have the proportionately largest eggs of any snake type. The mother lays only one egg...which hatches into a baby almost half her size. Scientists think that, if the babies were any smaller, they would not be able to eat. The opposite case is true with giant pythons, who can lay clutches of hundreds! Size matters - just ask the people who take home Burmese pythons without realizing how monstrously huge they get.

Source.

I love volunteering at the Field. I get inspired for so many entries, but only a few of them make the cut. Now, if only I could actually get paid to do things like that photo up top.

Happy New Year:Glowing Cockroaches For All!

2014-01-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

So let's start a new yearly tradition: Find our favorite new species discovered this past year. There were a lot of cool things, including a tyrannosaurid and a smallish extinct felid from Tibet. My pick, however, goes to...

Via Pintrest.

...a cockroach. An adorable, glow-in-the-dark cockroach, but still a cockroach. It has been dubbed Luchihormetica luckae, with no good common name. We'll just call him "Lucky" for the rest of this entry; nobody wants to write that name out ten plus times, and face it, this is one of the more likeable cockroaches out there. Just don't get any ideas about stealing his Lucky Charms. He really doesn't like that.

Here's why this little cockroach of glowy awesomeness was picked over a T-Rex relative: I have never seen anything like Lucky! It's apparently mimicking another toxic, glow in the dark insect called a click beetle. This beetle is toxic; that paint job is warning colors. This is the only known instance of a glow being used as mimicry. Yeah, these guys will survive the apocalypse just fine.

Bioluminescent bugs are rare. The most commonly-known ones are glow worms and fireflies. Along with glowing on its body, the "eyes" on its glowy outline are pools of bioluminescent bacteria. Don't "ew" that - if you didn't have E.coli in your gut, let's just say digestion would be a lot harder. It's exciting to have another glowing bug to add to the short list!

Lucky was found in the rainforests of Ecuador near an active volcano. That's a pretty bizarre environment if you think about it. There cannot be too many rainforests like that around, meaning that this cockroach might only be able to live in that one area. Save the rainforest - it has neon roaches! It sounds weird to use a cockroach as a reason to protect the rainforest, but darnit, this is a gorgeous one!

Happy New Year! May many new species be discovered in 2014!

Christmas Special: Christmas Tinner.

2013-12-26T23:07:00.001-08:00

I could have done a lot of entries for Christmas. There are plenty of weird Christmas foods, including pig feet, lamb heads, and KFC, eaten around the world. Some places even omit meat entirely. Oh, and I'm never out of winter creatures; I've just run out of Christmasy ones.

Alas, there's a new Christmas dinner on the block. It's "holiday special," "They Actually Eat That," and "Newsflash" all at once. Its name? "Christmas Tinner."

Yes, "tinner." As in, dinner. In a tin can. No matter where you go, Christmas dinner is a lot of food. That means somebody managed to compact a full-course meal in a tin can. Dear gods, what is this?

"A Christmas dinner with turkey, potatoes, roast carrots and broccoli sounds quite nice. Unless it's all served in a can, that is. The "Christmas Tinner," created by graphic designer Chris Godfrey, features a nine-course Christmas meal, layered into one tin can.

This dinner monstrosity is in all likelihood fake -- Godfrey created a similar meal-in-a-can project earlier this year. Currently, the can is supposedly sold out on GAME, a UK-based website for video gamers.

"The GAME Christmas Tinner is the ultimate innovation for gamers across the nation who can’t tear themselves away from their new consoles and games on Christmas Day," the website reads." -via Huffington Post.

Of course, it could all be fake- the creator's a graphic designer, after all. On the plus side, if anybody is left after the apocalypse, this is one holiday feast that'll still be around. Either way would not surprise me at this point!

Why Petco Is A Rip-Off- Ball Pythons, Genetics, and You!

2013-11-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

So, yeah. Still no job. Petco rejected me. I can nigh-guarantee that I know more about snakes than anybody else they're willing to hire, but since they did not want that, I will instead expose why you're pretty much guaranteed to get ripped off if you buy a snake from them - specifically, a ball python.

I'm going to venture a guess that the majority of ball pythons in Petco's tanks are normal, male ball pythons. They will probably cost anywhere from 50-80 USD. I will now be very blunt and say that you should be paying significantly less for the very same, if not a better, snake.

Why do I say this? Ball pythons are so overbred that they have been called the "dogs of the reptile world." Of all the ball pythons out there, the most useless, genetically, are the normal males. People will thus try to get rid of them as soon as possible, even going so far as selling them in bulk.

A brief refresher on how genetics work: Each parent has two alleles for any given gene. Both mommy and daddy pass on one allele each to the offspring. Each baby carries one allele from each parent, so no two babies will be exactly alike. There are a bunch of different ways to inherit traits (mostly recessive and co-dominant), but we will be focused on the almighty "co-dominant."

Ball python breeders, and snake breeders in general, love the word "co-dominant." It means that you can get something cool out of one breeding. Recessive traits like albinism are more widely-known, but take a grand total of 4-6 years to see the results of if you start with het babies. There is no way to tell whether the babies are het or not; this gets more problematic in future breeding, when you get things like "66% het." Co-dominance is favored because your first clutch might yield a baby that looks almost exactly like one of the parents. If you breed two co-dominants, expect even more craziness, but we won't be doing that. Instead, let's look at everybody's first python breeding: normal x pastel.

Square by NERD. Visit them for more awesome co-dominants!

This is a Punnett square for any normal x codominant ball python trait. For those of you who do not know what a Punnett square is, it is a grid showing potential offspring of two parents. In this case, the normal (probably the mom) is on the vertical axis, the pastel is horizontal, and the potential offspring are in the boxes.

NERD was awesome and used a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on your strain) color enhancer called "pastel" for their example. Pastels are ball pythons with the brightness/contrast messed with to the point where they look anywhere from bright lemon yellow to a slightly cleaner than usual normal. They are the cheapest of the co-dominant morphs. A lot of ball python traits, including the platinum and legendary banana ball, are co-dominant as well; if you're interested in those, simply copy-paste this Punnett with whatever fancy trait you like. Most of the good ones are co-dominant or dominant, and will thus pass their traits on in the first generation. This can lead to some amazing clutches!

That one normal in the back looks...kinda sad.

So, let's assume this clutch contained 4 ball python eggs with an even gender split. Four eggs, 2 male, 2 female. From what I've heard, this would actually be a pretty awesome clutch; four is OK for a first time ball clutch. The better size is 8-10, but let's keep it at 4 for simplicity's sake. Breeders breed so many of them that it seems like there are always more than enough. What we're looking for, here, is that codominant gene and the sex.

We have a 50% chance of getting another pastel ball just breeding a male pastel to a normal female. That one pastel could be male or female. The other members of this clutch could also be male or female. The pastels there can be bred/sold regardless. The normals might not be so lucky.

If one of the pastels is female, wow, we were lucky, right? Let's breed her back to daddy after a few years and see if we can get a super-pastel. Better still, cross her with a spider, pinstripe, mojave - whatever! Co-dominant traits blend excellently with each other and themselves. NERD has some 4-morph combos. I'm sure their prices range into the thousands, and if this sounds appealing to you, bear in mind that you're going to have to start with one trait like the pastel. With a female pastel, you're well on your way!

However.

If we're assuming everything came out with a nice, even split, this leaves us with two magical mystery balls. These, like the pastels, could be either male or female. Remember how co-dominance and simple dominance work: you've either got it or ya don't. In other words, barring any hidden recessive traits, any normal males are useless for breeding.

If both pastels turned out to be male, however, we would lose the dreaded normal male. Then we would wind up with two pastel males and two perfectly good females. Remember, it doesn't matter whether the females are pastel or not; as long as one copy of the pastel gene is passed on, the offspring will still have the pastel trait. Sure, it'd be a bummer to not have a female pastel, but those two females can still be sold for a decent price, and can be used in future breedings. "Breeder-size" females do sell. Normal males do not...unless you're smart.

Snake breeders will get rid of their loser males ASAP. If you see a tank of normal ball pythons in a pet store, I will bet you money that 90% of that tank, if not all of it, will be composed of dud males. This site is selling them for 25 bucks. Compare that to whatever Petco's selling them for. It's just another reason to buy locally instead of not knowing where you snake's coming from, too.

You might also see beautiful babies like these from Genetic Gems.

In short, unless you are breeding super forms to super forms, every day, all day, you will get a normal male ball python. He will not be a good stud, but he will satisfy the kid down the street who's just itching for a pet snake because you happened to have one (or twenty). Normal males can potentially come out of every breeding, they won't sell very well, and thus, there are a million floating around in miscellaneous pet stores for people who just want a good pet snake.

Now, this is fine if you just want a pet ball python. If, however, you do a little homework and look for reptile conventions, I can guarantee that you will get a better deal on a male ball. These make fine pets and are absolutely ideal for beginners. Also, Petco.com says that they sometimes have co-dominant ball python morphs in stock; I have never seen these, so if you happen to find one for a decent price, snap it up.

P.S. - For those of you who might be interested, I still have baby corn snakes for sale! E-mail the_last_hetaira@yahoo.com

Creature Feature: Horned Screamer.

2013-11-16T21:08:00.000-08:00

Well, it turns out I won't be getting a job this season because I won't be able to work Black Friday. There's always Christmas, but for now, I am formulating my revenge in the form of math and punnett squares. I'm not good at math, but reptiles will be involved. I do not mean snakes in mailboxes. For now, have an awesome bird:

Source.

This odd, not-pheasant is called a "Horned Screamer" (Anhima cornuta). It is the only member of the genus Anhima. It can be found in most of the top half of South America, specifically in lowlands and marshes. Despite their pheasant-like appearance, screamers are more closely related to ducks and geese than to chickens.

Right off the bat, the horned screamer is a weird bird. It looks kinda like a pheasant, but has slightly webbed feet. It's also huge- a little over a meter long. If a goose and a pheasant somehow managed to mate, you would get a screamer. Somehow. I'll get into the interesting-ness of avian genitalia at some point.

The Horned Screamer is odd by screamer standards, too. It is the one of the very few birds that has a horn - an actual piece of keratin loosely attached to the skull. The wings have very similar projections, making it look like an already-weird bird with batlike claws. These are fragile bits, and the tips are often broken off. Nobody really knows why it has this horn and apparently those claws, but it sure looks unique.

So why is this thing called a screamer? Let's go to YouTube and find out!

Well, it makes just as much sense as whatever the hell the fox says, right? I'm not sure I would call it "screaming," but what would you call that?

Oh, and by the way, this odd bird is not under any threats aside from perhaps habitat loss. Even though they are fairly easy to hunt, screamers don't make good eating. Their flesh is airy and overall unpalatable - in short, anyone who isn't starving doesn't actually eat that. Sort of a relief.

Halloween Bio-Art: The Centaur of Tymfi.

2013-11-04T00:43:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I did one of these. Vacations and a certain piece punched a ton of holes in my sense of time sense of duty, and I've actually all-but-landed a real job! My next post will probably talk about reptiles more; look forward to that. :)

Source.

Wait a sec....was that a real centaur skeleton?

No. It's a fake made for the International Wildlife Museum in Tuscon by sculptor and zoologist Bill Willers. The whole point of the exhibit is to make people question how we know what we know. That centaur looks pretty darn real, and, doubtless, some silly internet ad with "Real Or Fake?" will pop up. Don't even click that; it's a very well-made fake, but a fake nonetheless.

Everything about this centaur is a brilliiant piece of psuedo-science. "Tymfi" is not a real city in Greece, but it sounds Greek enough to make people buy it. The whole history of the centaur's excavation is fake, but adds more flesh on the bones, if you will. The exhibit tries its hardest to make you believe that centaurs once existed. It will be leaving in 2014, so if you happen to be around Tuscon (AZ?), check it out while you can.

The exhibit also features a few real skulls and bones. These are all tied into the whole "explaining myths" idea. For example, like the Field once did, they cite the Protoceratops as the likely inspiration for the gryphon, a mythical lion-eagle hybrid. They have also added a "cyclops" in the form of a Mastodon skull and a few other such specimens. Neat.

Museums do this sort of thing all the time. New York's Museum of Natural History had a "Mythic Creatures" exhibit that got extended by popular demand. The Field had something similar. Fantastic creatures are a huge draw, to the point where one wonders if such a thing is really OK for museums.

At some point, I likely mentioned the idea that it was not OK to put things like white tigers in zoos. The argument goes that white tigers are not natural, and thus do not belong in an exhibit detailing what tigers are really like. On some level, I agree with this; white tigers are indeed exceptionally bastardized, and are only found very rarely in the wild. Better there than in somebody's backyard regardless.

Unlike with, say, white tigers in zoos, mythological animals like centaurs and griffins are A-OK in museums. At one time, people thought chimaeras and dragons were real. It just goes to prove that science, and our perceptions of it, are constantly changing. I particularly like this quote emphasizing Willers's intent behind the centaur:

"I want to trigger that belief and extend it, to trigger a feeling of wonder that connects people to the natural world, to see a person like themselves as a wild animal," says Willers.

Does he succeed? Post below. :)

"What Does The Fox Say?"

2013-10-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

First off, let me just say that the song I am referencing in the title is very silly. "Stupid" would imply that I hate it, which is not 100% true; I appreciate a catchy hook for what it is. The video is also okay. It is, however, still a very silly song in that it is about a guy wondering what foxes say, and why there is no convenient onomatopoeia for it like "moo," "woof," or "meow."

What? You don't know what "onomatopoeia" is? Let's fix that!

"Onomatopoeia" is the fancy, English major word for "sound effects" in word form. Words that represent sounds like "bang," "wham," or "zoom" are onomatopoeia. They have no meaning aside from the sound they are representing. There, you've learned something.

Foxes actually have a great variety of calls. For all you dog and cat owners out there, no doubt you have noticed different noises for when your pet wants to play, is hungry, or is not in the mood for much of anything. Foxes have an extremely versatile vocal range. Your dog is a singing bum on the street compared to the vocal rock stars foxes are.

Take a lookie here:

That's a lot of very distinct sounds for one animal, no? No wonder nobody really knows what the fox said; they probably didn't even know it was a fox.

Here's the "Vixen's Scream" they mentioned, complete with facial expressions:

Oh, and for all you Pokemon fans, here's what your Fennekin sounds like when it is happy:

Or, "AHMG YOU GAVE ME A POKEPUFF, YAAAAAYYYY!"

So, you tell me: What does the fox say? Write your own onomatopoeia for what the fox says below. I'm sure Ylvis got it right somewhere. He said too many different things for one of them not to hit the mark.

Newsflash: Proteins and Dinosaurs with Funny Names!

2013-10-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

So, I know a few people taking biology, organic chemistry, and other such things. It came up that the only reasons a Classics degree like mine was good were 1. it stokes your imagination like crazy and 2. it helps you name things for science. This led to a discussion about how things are named, including the rather bizarre Dracorex hogwartsia.

Dracorex hogwartsia was an herbivorous pachycephalosaur ("thick-headed" dinosaurs). Like a certain other pachy who will definitely be getting some limelight this Halloween, it was discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota.

Indeed, this dinosaur does look a fair bit like a dragon. The dome found on most pachies is reduced in Dracorex, leading to a very dragonlike skull. Primeval took advantage of the similarity: in one episode, a knight and a "dragon" crossed a time gap; they went so far as to give the Dracorex little fins, furthering the "dragon" idea.

But "hogwartsia?" Really, science? Forgive my use of internet slang, but "LOL."J.K. Rowling was, of course, thrilled to have a dinosaur name inspired by her work. Warning: people who know Latin tend to know science, and Rowling knows helluva lot of Latin.

Dracorex's odd pseudo-Latin is nothing compared to what some scientists have done with proteins, however. No matter how many pop culture references are named in dinosaurs, they cannot compete with how scientists have named genes and proteins lately. There have been a number of proteins named after video games or video game characters, proving just how nerdy scientists really are.

This is fanart. Not mine, just adorable.

Hey, weren't the new Pokemon games released this month? Why haven't I done anything on Pikachurin - the electric protein named after the most iconic Pokemon in existence? (There was also a carcinogenic gene that Nintendo sued over - this is not that gene.)

Pikachurin is a protein that helps the perception of light in mammalian eyes. Thisprotein is also known by the equally funny-sounding name EGFLAM ("EGF-like, fibronectin type-III and laminin G-like domain-containing protein")- we'll stick with Pikachu, thanks. It was named after Pikachu because it moved "lightning fast" and conducted electricity from the eyes to the brain. It's pretty much necessary for the human eye to function. Not a bad thing to name after a colorful electric rodent, although I'm sure the protein being discovered in Osaka, Japan had something to do with it.

Pikachu was not the first video game mascot to get his own protein. That honor goes to the sonic hedgehog protein. It is one of three genes in the "hedgehog" protein channel, with the other two being "desert hedgehog" and "Indian hedgehog." Sonic is the best studied, and with good reason: this protein has an impact on anything from brain development to the growth of digits and limbs. It's responsible for limb regulation in cetaceans, so if you ever see a dolphin with unearthly feet near the base of its tail, blame Sonic for that.

There have been some objections to naming a gene "sonic hedgehog," namely that it removes some of the sobriety that science is so well-known for. Me? I think once you've named a protein channel "hedgehog," you've already opened yourself to jokes. It's just a slippery slope like that.

Creature Feature: White Gators! and Wild Gators!

2013-10-20T21:13:00.000-07:00

There are a number of advantages to visiting places that naturally have cool wild animals. One, you get to see wild animals in their natural habitats instead of behind glass. Two, the specimens that are behind glass are usually pretty cool. I tend to make it a point to visit the zoo whenever I go somewhere else; it's usually a good indication of how well-informed people are about exotics. The Audubon Zoo in NOLA had quite a treat, and I did not even get to see all of the grounds.

Louisiana's zoo has a pair of leucistic American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis). Apparently they have wild white gators, too, but these were probably captive bred. These particular white gators are celebrities anyways.

A brief course in Alligators 101:the American alligator is native to most of the southern United States, from the Carolinas into Louisiana. These massive reptiles can get 999 lbs for males (who are indeed larger) and 13 feet long. As one could probably guess, most alligators are black- olive green, not white. They have powerful tails, can move faster than a human on land (25 MPH), and are armed with lots of teeth.

So, why is the gator above not albino? Take a close look. The eyes are black, and there is black speckling on the nose. An albino would have pink (or blue?) eyes and no black at all. Regardless, it looks like the swamps of Louisiana might be a "weird gene reservoir" like Florida is for corn snakes. They might also be intentionally protected like the Shirohebi of Iwakuni, but I wouldn't put money on that; the zoo got those white gators from somewhere, then probably bred them.

Along with seeing these unique gators in the zoo, I got to get up close and personal with wild alligators in the Louisiana bayou. Our savvy tour guide knew exactly where the gators were and fed them marshmallows. (Our tour guide, by the way, was apparently the inspiration for a certain firefly in The Princess and the Frog.) Don't take a fan-powered boat; those things move so fast that I'd be amazed if you saw anything. We got to see gators snapping up marshmallows like nothing else. A waste of jaw power? Maybe, but it got us some incredible shots!

Unlike the whaling trip, on which I saw no whales, this tour boat had a guaranteed way to see an alligator: the boat had a baby on board! These gators are released into the wild when they get to be around two feet long. Imagine having an adult gator on a tour boat; at least you'd get your money's worth!

By the way, Louisiana is known as "hunter's paradise" for a reason. Alligator hunting is not only permitted, but encouraged. Some people also farm alligators (which have their own tours). Alligators certainly aren't an endangered species, and the Louisiana government allows a certain amount of them to be hunted. Don't worry about taking a tooth, paw, or gator head home; if any state knows what to do with alligators, it's Louisiana. Enjoy gator meat while you're there, too.

Little Shop of Horrors: Welwitschia.

2013-10-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

Look at the above image. What do you see?

If you think that's washed-up seaweed, take note of how this image doesn't look like it's near the ocean. Trash off a truck? A plausible theory. Litter? Haha, no. A sign that the Great Old Ones are coming? I dunno; ask Bogleech about that one. If you said it's a Welwitschia, you either read the title or happen to be a botanist.

Welwitschia mirabilis is a bizarre plant found on the Atlantic coast of Angola and Namibia, who has the odd plant on its coat of arms. The plant can only live in arid environments with occasional fog. It is named for the Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who also discovered a few other botanical oddities in his lifetime. This particular plant happens to be a living fossil, going virtually unchanged since the Mesozoic. The Welwitschia's closest relatives are, of all things, pine trees. Yeah, bring a Welwitschia over next Christmas; I'm sure it'll go over well with the relatives. (Actually, you can grow your own!)

Welwitschia are amazingly odd plants. The 'mess' of leaves is actually just two very large leaves. These are the exact same leaves that the plant had as a seedling, and have grown very large over time. They have simply been shredded with wear. These two leaves are all the plant grows during its entire, very long life. There's not much beyond these leaves, either - just a stem and roots. Suddenly the most basic of plants has become a strange thing.

How long is its life, anyways? Oh, one or two millennia. A single Welwitschia can be anywhere from 1,000-2,000 years old. We're used to trees living that long- not displaced patches of seaweed. Bear in mind that this thing is still just a stem, roots, and two leaves. Yes, it's always just two throughout thousands of years. During that time, it can also grow huge.

Disclaimer: May eat old ladies.

The relatives of Welwitschia dominated Late Paleozoic and Mesozoic fauna. The tattered dregs in the sand are all that remains of this unique genus. It can still live for thousands of years. If nothing else, Welwitschia proves one thing: sometimes the simplest answer is the best.

I Actually Ate That: Crawfish.

2013-10-09T23:16:00.000-07:00

For those who do not keep up with my dA page, I have been traveling. A lot. This time, I got to head down south to New Orleans - a city known for sex, drugs, and...smooth jazz? Oh, and excellent food. This was what my adventurous tongue took on my first night in town:

This was a massive platter consisting of crayfish etouffee (the stew-ish stuff), au gratin, dressing balls, and crayfish tails served like popcorn shrimp. They did not tell us that the dish would be very heavily spiced, but that's just what you have to expect in NOLA. That, and Bourbon Street being full of sex and liquor every night.

Crayfish are like lobsters, but smaller. They generally inhabit unpolluted, freshwater areas of all sorts. They will eat anything you put in their tank- even other crayfish. There are some that do make good aquarium pets; please do research if you find crayfish interesting animals and wish to keep one rather than eat it. Otherwise, crayfish of the less friendly sorts are available at bait shops. More on that later.

Not all crayfish are created equal. Almost all of them are sensitive to polluted water. On the flipside, crayfish used as bait or farmed as food can decimate local crayfish populations if they get loose- they eat each other, remember? North American crayfish introduced a nasty water mould, Aphanomyces astaci, into European crayfih populations; the resistant American crayfish (like the signal crayfish below) have taken over. Eating invasive crayfish is a happy solution. Circle of life, now let's eat these guys!

There are a million ways to prepare crayfish, and Louisiana offers a good portion of them in one state. Crayfish tails look almost exactly like popcorn shrimp when breaded, but taste nothing alike. They can be boiled, put in gumbo, served au gratin like lobster, and a million other culinary styles. I've even had crayfish sushi. If you can handle other decapods, crayfish will be no problem for you.

So, what did I think of the four dishes above? I'm not the best judge on land meat; I do, however, like seafood. Without a doubt, crayfish is the best crustacean I have had so far. It has no aftertaste like lobster, is more noticeable than shrimp, and doesn't taste like crab. In cajun cuisine, however, the spices tend to be piled on so thickly that you can't taste much of anything beneath them. I highly recommend etouffee if you want some genuine Louisiana crawdad, and au gratin or as little "popcorn" crayfish tails if you actually want to taste the stuff. The "dressing balls" were almost entirely spices. If you like shellfish already, you'll probably appreciate this Southern favorite. Alligator meat is also pretty abundant, so if that's your ticket, come into the bayou.

I Actually Ate That: Turtle.

2013-10-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

So, while in Vancouver's Chinatown, there were a million food markets showcasing a million foods that Americans would consider "weird." Snakes and (Tokay) geckos on a stick come to mind immediately. There were a few large mushrooms I could not identify. They had tanks of live sole, tilapia, lobster, and crabs. For future reference, the smells mean freshness!

Oh, and I got to try turtle.

Those are turtle balls. Haha, no, they did not go inside a turtle and take out its junk. That's just turtle meat rolled up into a ball as an appetizer! I quite liked them, even if the sauce was something that I could not quite place (soy? probably). Turtle had a strange taste that I'm having trouble describing, but could probably pick out again. Despite being deep-fried, turtle was actually the most healthful of the dim-sum offered at the beginning of the meal.

Turtle has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries. You've heard the shtick several times on this column: you eat an animal, you gain its superpowers. Turtles are among the most long-lived of reptiles, with the record-holder for chelonians being Harriet at 179 years old- that's over twice the lifespan of the average human. Although that was a Galapagos tortoise and not a soft-shell turtle as is commonly used in cuisine, chelonians in general have an almost sage look to them with lifespans to match. It's not unreasonable to think that they might grant anybody who eats their flesh considerable longevity - maybe even youthfulness.

The kicker is that the Chinese were right about this one. Turtle meat has a number of health benefits according to Western science, too! It's significantly lower in calories than beef, albeit with less protein. It's also rich in vitamins A, B1, B2, and B6, which help make food processing easier. The minerals calcium, phosphorus, and zinc are also abundant in turtle meat. The stuff is pretty much its own vitamin shop if you do rigorous activity, and certainly makes a welcome alternative to your standard meats.

Another, odder turtle product called guilinggao is said to be a miracle worker for the skin. It's a strange jelly made from the plastron (tough belly) of a turtle (preferably the three-lined box or "golden coin" turtle, Cuora trifasciata) and a few other botanical ingredients. It's actually a jelly dessert, thought to be good for the skin. A word of warning for foodies everywhere: not all guilinggao contains actual turtle, despite what you see on the can.

Japan has another version of turtle meat still known as suppon. It's expensive, and usually packaged in plastic wrap like in the above screenie from Railgun S. Like most turtle meat, it's made from soft-shell turtle. Its uses are more cosmetic than medicinal; supposedly, its meat is high in collagen, which any lady out there will remember as being great for the skin. Its blood also supposedly tastes great with wine mixed in. The things people do for beauty, I guess.

Next time you go to Chinatown, take a good look around. Stop into a good restaurant and see what's on the native Chinese menu. They know how to make their food good, regardless of "weird" ingredients. Some of it is even great for you! I also could have tried snake soup, but decided against it...because I'm not really fond of soup, snake or no.

Bio-Art: Lisa Black.

2013-09-23T22:59:00.001-07:00

So, before I went to Canada, I ditched my smart phone. At first, it felt like I was a little lost at sea, but then I realized something: no, I was not lost, I had been freed. Since then, I've felt more creative and happy without the phone than I was with it. The experience has also made me more aware that more and more people are slowly becoming little more than cyborgs, unable to lead normal lives without some electronic whosiwhatzit.

Then Lisa Black reminded me that I will be assimilated, and resistance is futile.

Hasta la vista, Bambi.

Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1982, Lisa Black does plenty of work that reminds us how terrifying or beautiful the future can be. The idea behind many of her pieces forces viewers to question the relationship between, and eventual integration of, nature with technology. This does not mean animals with iPods. It means that we have to face the inevitable reconsideration of our definition of "natural."

There are two main types of cyborg animals on Lisa Black's production line: "Departed" and "Fixed." The "Departed" pieces feature various animal skulls with various cybernetic bits - gears, wires, etc. - attached. The "Fixed" series hits a bit harder, integrating various mechanical parts with more or less whole animal bodies. The very use of the word "Fixed" also suggests that what was already natural wasn't 100% perfect to begin with - and, admittedly, it usually isn't.

Another thing Lisa Black does involves found butterflies preserved forever as jewelry. While not as jarring as her cyborgs, these are still pretty cool pieces. For those not aware, dead butterflies are extremely fragile creatures. They are nonetheless beautiful, causing many a butterfly to be put behind glass in order to preserve it. At least they get out there as wearables, here. See them and more at this page, which also shows off the cyborg beasts and skulls.

I'm going to (mis)quote my bio-art book when I say, "mankind has evolved to manipulate evolution." Indeed, maybe a reconsideration of nature's sanctity is in order after these dozens of millennia mankind has been on Earth. Dogs aren't really natural given how much we've meddled with them; neither is corn.That still doesn't mean that we should all be glued to our iPhones just because they're the future.

Creature Feature: Vasa Parrots.

2013-09-17T23:13:00.000-07:00

Oh! A Creature Feature! It's been a while, hasn't it? Let's look at the weirdest parrot you've eeeeveer seen:

This long-legged, uncanny parrot is a Greater Vasa parrot (Coracopsis vasa). Vasa parrots of all species are native to Madagascar (AKA "that African island with lemurs that got a movie series." Yes, you can get them as pets, but please do your homework.

First of all, these parrots are black. Not gray like an African Gray, not iridescent - gray-black. It's not glossy black, like a crow, but more of a matte black - charcoal black, if you will. That's virtually the last color one expects from a parrot. The pinkish bill stands out, too, making for a striking bird on the whole.

Vasas are thought to be among the most primitive of parrots. Some of you who keep up with animal news might remember a deal a while back when it was found that not all "raptors" - that is, eagles, falcons, hawks, and owls - were related. In fact, parrots are quite closely related to falcons, and the vasa's got some pretty good evidence of this, starting with being a hunting parrot. Females are also larger and dominant, as they are in birds of prey. They also have another very primitive trait that I will get to later, but

Then these parrots start showing their mating colors. What, do I mean that the black suddenly erupts into multicolored plumage? Oh, I wish; vasa parrots have a much stranger mating patterns. Mating groups are open, to say the least, with any given female having 3-8 males in her non-exclusive manharem. The skin of the female turns yellow-orange beneath her feathers while she's tending young...and then she becomes bald so that everybody can see it:

Vasa are also the only parrots to have hemipenes. The cloaca, usually dickless, everts when the birds are mating. The lock can last for up to an hour. That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about parrot sex, but there you go.