Tag Archives: nature

***Octopus

Posted on by
octopus

(photo: wikimedia)

By Richard Schweid. The silver-blue cover, with its sophisticated type treatment was almost as alluring as the topic of this slim book. If you (or your kids or nieces and nephews) are fascinated by natural history and some special branch on the animal family tree, one of these Animal series books published by London-based Reaktion Books may be just the ticket. Lively biographies of 70 animals from Albatross to Wolf have been published so far—a diverse array that includes ant, cockroach, crocodile, gorilla, lobster, moose, parrot, and trout.

You’ll want to take a peek at them first though. I wasn’t surprised by my book’s many intriguing facts about octopuses, like about their decentralized brains, about how laboratory octopuses sometimes dismantle their tanks—suicide for them, actually—and outsmart their keepers, about how they are caught and processed and cooked, and about their millennia-long role in art and literature, as the malevolent force behind many fictional sea disasters.

What I did not expect to learn was that octopuses have a firm place in erotic art (Octopussy, anyone? The movie, regarded as one of the weakest Bond films, took its title if not its plot from Ian Fleming). This tradition was perhaps most prominent in Japanese art, including the famous woodcut, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which you can find out more about here.

“Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be the characteristics of this creature.” (Claudius Aelianus, c. 200 CE).

Why I Don’t Eat Octopus

Posted on by
octopus

(photo: wikimedia/commons)

Several compelling articles about the octopus have emerged lately from the laboratories of marine biology (like this one in Wired 10/2013, by author Katherine Harmon Courage who’s written a whole book on the topic). They’ve dangled fascinating information in front of my nose. Like: researchers cannot set anything down—coffee cup, clipboard, whatever—near their octopus tanks unless they want to find them in the tank. Like: the octopus does not have a central brain, as vertebrates do; its intelligence—supposedly on a par with that of dogs—is distributed throughout its body and works quite differently than ours. Like: the eight arms of an octopus can mimic the texture and color of whatever surface the animal is resting on, and they can do so separately—two gravelly-looking arms and six sandy-looking ones, for example. Amazing.

Last week I snatched up Octopus, by Richard Schweid, one of a series of natural history books published by Reaktion Books, Ltd., now atop my 2015 to-read pile. The book is rich with photos and illustrations from world art, and its first line is a grabber: “When you watch an octopus, an octopus watches you back.”

A question to Mr. Know-It-All in this month’s Wired is, “I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?” Christopher Niemann’s response concludes “all animals are likely too intelligent to eat.” But he concedes readers will probably continue to eat them anyway. He says, “I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.” Or empathy. But I don’t eat octopus not because they are too intelligent, but because they’re too interesting.

For more Octopus-amazement, see my review of The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.

****The Danube

Posted on by

Danube, river

(photo: author)

By Nick Thorpe, a BBC East and Central European correspondent who has lived in Budapest for more than 25 years. Subtitle of this book is “a journey upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest”—in Bavaria, home of Danube’s the headwaters, a spring in the town of Donaueschingen. The Danube, queen of rivers, runs through and along the borders of ten countries of Western and Central Europe—Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany—the middle six of which I’ve visited. In one brief stretch, it passes through four nations’ capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. And through great swaths of sparsely populated countryside, known mainly to birds and watermen.

Thorpe’s travelogue-cum-history lesson-cum natural history exploration ranges widely and freely over this vast geographic and intellectual territory. In part his story is told through the wars and occupations, the conquests and lost empires that have shaped the region over thousands of years, and in part through his warm-hearted stories of individual men and women who still depend on the river as neighbor and provider today. Ways of life that withstood centuries of disruption have been torn apart by modern improvements—hydroelectric dams, locks, canals, diversions, “straightening.”

Though Thorpe understands the motives behind these changes, his heart is on the side of the scattered environmentalists who are trying to restore the natural flow of the river and, here and there, to nudge it back into its old, meandering course. Efforts to do so have led to a resurgence of wildlife and an elevation of spirit among those who perceive a river as a living thing, moving and changing, mile by mile, as Thorpe’s book so eloquently shows.

Related articles

Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey

Posted on by
cosmos, science
Star formation in the cosmos (photo: NASA)

I really want to like this program, though I thought the opening episode of the 13-part series was too conceptual. Perhaps the producers believed that a generation of kids raised on Star Wars and CGI special effects wouldn’t warm to it otherwise, and perhaps that was just the result of getting some basics out of the way, but I’ll be looking for future episodes to have less sweep and more deep. Reviewers liked it.

In a tribute to counter-programming acumen, the Sunday night Fox broadcast is smack up against Masterpiece Theatre, probably cutting the audience for both. Thankfully, Cosmos reruns on Mondays on the National Geographic channel. Anything that would help Americans take science more seriously has to be appreciated. Said Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson in a Wired interview, “The idea that science is just some luxury that you’ll get around to if you can afford it is regressive to any future a country might dream for itself.” Dream on, my fellow Americans.

Let It Snow (Not)!

Posted on by

snow, writing, writer, author, mystery, suspense, reader“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

The Central and Northeast U.S. isn’t the only country hit by snowstorm after snowstorm this winter. Take a look at how Tokyo residents responded after a 10-inch blizzard—its biggest blizzard in decades. Snow sculptures from the land of “Hello Kitty.”

Photo gallery from the 24th Annual International Snow Sculpture  Championships – Breckenridge, Colorado. Tokyo amateurs, be in awe!

Have a cup of hot chocolate and let Frank sing to you. Let it Snow!

Hot chocolate not warming enough? Here’s a hot toddy recipe that calls for brandy, whiskey, or rum (whatever you have, basically) and tea. The recipe says you can skip the tea. Just so it’s hot!

Your Cryosphere Glossary from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  Perfect for teachers, dads, and moms who get asked those tricky snow questions. Find out where it’s snowing right now with the NSIDC “near-real-time” data map.

Simon Beck’s Snow Art—made by stomping around in the snow, very precisely. Not just your everyday snow angel.

A collection of Snow Poems. I like this one by Frederick Seidel. Good to remember when you’re stuck in the snow. Six-sided, too.

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

 A recent op-ed about the incomparable snow leopard, and how the big cats are saving people. She has her eye on YOU.

snow leopard, writing, mystery, author, reader, suspense

Summer Fun!

Posted on by

butterflies hatched 004Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Belmont Stakes, the June jewel of Triple Crown races, last weekend I was in Washington, D.C.—a fine day in the nation’s capital—coming off several nights at the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, and today, a friend has organized a boat trip around Manhattan for her 90th birthday. What a way to celebrate summer!

Up early this morning to write this, I was treated with the sight of a deer with six-point antlers picking his way across twenty feet of grassy back yard and disappearing into the woods. My glance flew to my hostas (intact) and deck planters (ditto), so the pleasure in seeing him remained intact. I haven’t been to the other side of the house yet to see whether he’s eaten all the buds off my daylily collection. One year I had no flowers at all, thanks to this unauthorized snacking.

Early summer is the season for black bear sightings in Princeton. This year, one even scouted the campus. Cubs or young bears, usually. Since New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, when bears go walkabout, it usually ends badly. A town councilman explained, “They come down from New York,” a statement that raised more questions than it answered. How does he know? Why?

It’s firefly season! The woods in the back of the house are full of them. I like to watch them testing their batteries for the night, down in the grass and slowly rising. PS – this neighborhood has no cicadas at all so far, while the town up the road a piece is dense with their noise.

A frog is in the pond, croaking noisily all night. I reassure myself that little frogs can have big voices. Still, I count the fish in the morning when I go out to feed them. A heron ate ten fish—and a couple of frogs, too—a few years ago, so the net remains on the pond all the time. Diminishes the effect, but the fish are safe. Fellow pond-owners describe the huge heron colony nearby in apocalyptic terms.

These days, my fish-feeding and desultory weeding are supervised by a catbird that must have built a nest in the shrubbery near the pond. She misses nothing. A wren established herself in the birdhouse out back. Every spring, the chickadees bounce among the branches, checking it out, but they are lookers, and she’s a buyer.

Enjoy this too-short season!

Summer Soundtrack