Tag: biology

H. P. Lovecraft’s “Melbourne Aquarium”

May 22 is the International Day for Biological Diversity, and what better excuse could I have to tell you about my trip to Melbourne Aquarium?

The tickets were part of my birthday gift from my beloved, and we went together. I hadn’t been since they’d expanded the place and added the penguins, and if you haven’t seen them, go. These aren’t local penguins; these are Antarctic penguins, of two species, the King and the Gentoo.

King Penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) are, as you might guess from the name, like Emperor Penguins, but a bit smaller. They’re not truly an Antarctic species, living instead on sub-Antarctic islands. They’re no wusses when it comes to the cold, though; there are millions of them on the icier side of the Antarctic Polar Front, the circle around the continent where cold Antarctic waters meet the warmer ones of the sub-Anatarcic area. They certainly look right at home in the icy enclosure at the Aquarium. It’s not hard to see how they get their name: they have quite an impressive, regal bearing, with their distinctive yellow markings, patience (they never seem in a hurry), and towering stature compared to the smaller Gentoos. They’re in pretty good shape for a species – they have a “Least Concern” rating on the conservation “Red list” maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The ones in the Aquarium, like the Gentoos, are from a breeding programme in New Zealand.

Gentoo Penguins (Pygoscelis papua) – the least populous species in Antarctica (though more populous in the Aquarium), and one rung worse (Near Threatened) on the IUCN list – are easily distinguished by the white marking on their heads, a band which runs from one eye to the other, almost suggesting a pair of flying goggles. They’re described on the informational plaques as “cheeky”. (Penguins are especially easy to anthropomorphise – it’s probably the way they walk upright, with flippers held out like arms.) The ones in the Aquarium certainly seem inquisitive; while we were there a staff member was cleaning the tank in diving gear, and the Gentoos were constantly biting and probing his wetsuit and breathing hose. They also seemed quite entranced by anything held up to the glass by visitors – programmes, watches, even just a finger. The pool for the penguins has glass on two sides, and two different Gentoo Penguins quite energetically followed my beloved’s finger as she traced patterns on the glass, never tiring of the game.

Next to the pool is where we spent most of our penguin watching time: penguins underwater are truly amazing. The Gentoos couldn’t get enough of it, shooting around the water like planes in a dogfight. Like seals, they’re almost comical on land, but sleek and perfect in the sea. Even the King Penguins, so much larger and more ponderous, were graceful in the water, if slower. (Let’s call it a kingly reserve.)

Those King Penguins are big, though, and I couldn’t help but recall the giant albino penguins of classic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness (in which the remains of an ancient pre-human civilisation are discovered in Antarctica, to the horror of the protagonists). Antarctica is one of the few places on Earth that still holds some kind of mystery; it’s difficult to imagine unknown “things” hidden in most places on the planet, but the white centre of Antarctica (though by now thoroughly mapped) is still a popular place to find hidden aliens and monsters in fiction. Followers in Lovecraft’s shoes include The Thing (most famously John Carpenter’s 1982 film version), the Doctor Who story The Seeds of Doom, and even Aliens vs Predator (don’t watch it).

Indeed, the only other place it seems credible to find monsters is under the sea, another theme explored by Lovecraft. Several of his creatures dwell there, waiting in the impenetrable depths. His most famous creature, Cthulhu, lies waiting in his hidden city on the sea floor, and is usually depicted as a giant humanoid figure with an octopus for a head; alien eyes and a mass of tentacles where a mouth should be.

Which brings me to my other favourite things in the Aquarium. I love octopi and cuttlefish and squid…the cephalopods. The cuttlefish in the Aquarium, right at the start of the main circuit through the exhibits, change colour in real time to match their environment. This all involves five different kinds of cells, packed densely under the skin – around 200 per square millimetre!

The changes don’t rely on the cuttlefish’s eyesight – which, though excellent, doesn’t perceive colour! They can, however, sense polarisation of light, which gives them an excellent sense of contrast. I’m fascinated by cephalopod eyes, too – they’re among the most advanced in the animal kingdom, similar to our own but quite different (one of the best examples of convergent evolution). Cuttlefish have “W” shaped pupils and two foveae – areas richer in light receptors providing excellent vision, and of which humans have only one.

Cuttlefish share many things in common with [intlink id=”82″ type=”post”]squid[/intlink] and octopus – three hearts, copper-based oxygen-carrying molecules in their blood giving it a green colour, a doughnut shaped brain… They’re more alien than anything the Doctor Who production team has come up with in the last four years! (They seem limited to sticking animal heads and “hands” on human beings: Cat people, Rhino people and, most recently, Fly people. As I [intlink id=”349″ type=”post”]recently discussed[/intlink], this is dull and incredibly unrealistic.) Fittingly, for me, the last tank in the main round – it’s on the way out past the Sharks Alive exhibit – had an octopus.

A sign above the creature’s tank proclaimed that octopus are among the smartest creatures on Earth; that a logic puzzle that could confound a primate could be completed in six seconds by an octopus. I imagined for a second an octopus sitting on the tram completing an entire book of Sudoku puzzles while someone next to her struggled with the easy one in the mx, but it’s a much deeper statement than that. I found an excellent (if old) article from Discover magazine, Through the Eye of an Octopus, which goes into the research around octopus cognition. Research has suggested that they play, communicate, deceive, use tools, have personalities and  even sleep in ways they are startlingly like so-called “higher vertebrates” like us. I’ve often thought I’d like to have an octopus for a friend, rather than as a pet, and I think I’ve just talked myself into giving up one of my favourite dishes – salt and pepper squid.

Significantly for me, octopus have very small brains – something which challenges a long held prejudice against dinosaurs, and my favourite dinosaur especially. Stegosaurus had a brain the size of a walnut, very small for its body size, and is generally regarded as among the stupidest of dinosaurs. But the common octopus brain is the same size; albeit a very different shape, and it evolved to its current state over a much longer period, but still, it brings me hope. Perhaps a Stegosaurus could have managed a Sudoku as well.

Cat people and crinkly foreheads are not inevitable

Today’s Age has that rare thing – a news story about science. Specifically, astronomer Dr Alan Boss’ assertion that the existence of extraterrestrial life is “inevitable”. (ET? There goes the neighbourhood, Richard Alleyne of The Telegraph, Chicago; printed in The Age, February 17 2009.) Dr Boss is from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, and they don’t have any such announcement listed as news; Dr Boss does have a lecture scheduled for early March, however, talking about this idea in the context of his new book, The Crowded Universe…but while there’s a shade of self-promotion, I think we can assume it’s all for science.

Dr Boss (and his students must love that name) reckons the aliens must be out there because of “the new belief that there is an abundant number of habitable planets like Earth” – according to the article, there could be “100 billion trillion Earth-like planets in space”. The most interesting bit – why this “new” belief has come about – is entirely absent from the article, so all we get is a retread of the old “well, if there are so many planets out there, there must be life on some of them!” routine. That argument may hold some water (if you’ll excuse the pun, which you’ll get as you read on), but as I’ve been reading in What Does A Martian Look Like? (Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Ebury Press, 2002; I’ll be talking more about it on my book blog) this is the least interesting reason to believe life is out there.

The standard idea in astro-biology is that life can exist on planets in the “habitable zone” around a star: that is, the range of orbital distances in which the temperature variation allows water to exist as a solid, liquid and gas. This is rubbish for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the existence of water in various forms is dependant on a vast number of things beyond just a planet’s distance from the star. In our own solar system, now that Mars has proven barren, Jupiter’s moon Europa is the most likely candidate for extra-terrestrial life, with it’s liquid ocean safe below the huge ice-sheets on its surface.

But that’s assuming you even need water for life to exist. And why should you? Just because Star Trek and Star Wars prefer aliens who look like humans with ill-conceived cosmetic surgery or anthropomorphic animals, it doesn’t mean that’s what life will look like. Stewart and Cohen argue that astro-biology is really just the application of Earth-based biology on other planets. It’s parochialism on a grand scale; the galactic equivalent of travelling the world but spending the whole trip in “Irish” pubs and eating at McDonalds.

How do we get past this? Jack&Ian (this is how they refer to themselves in the book) say we need a new discipline, “xenoscience”, to properly consider what aliens will be like. An essential ingredient of xenoscience is imagaintion, and in a sense this is where science fiction, or at least the popular kind – where the “science” really translates to “physics buzzwords and folk biology as window dressing on a fantasy story” – has failed us. Yes, some authors have thought about what life might really be like, but mostly the point of an “alien race” is just to act as a stand-in for some aspect of human culture. For my money, the biggest proof of this is that no-one stops to think about what it really means to have half-human half-Vulcans. Even if alien life did, impossibly, look very similar to us, it doesn’t mean we can shag it, marry it or build a picket fence and have 2.4 children with it; that people accept this in Star Trek is a clear sign they don’t really think of Vulcans, Klingons and the rest of them as truly alien; I’m sure if you suggested the same sort of “first contact” or “close encounter of the fourth kind” with a more realistic ET, you’d probably be blocked by the Great Australian Internet filter.

I’m not quite finished the book, so I can’t tell you what Jack&Ian reckon a Martian would look like. But whatever life does exist out there, odds are it will be incredibly unfamiliar to us; truly “alien”. If we’re to recognise it when we see it, let alone have any chance of conversing with it, then we need to embrace the imagination we have. Imagining something doesn’t make it possible, but science is about change, about difference, and about possibilities. Often it works by eliminating possibilities – but we can’t eliminate them if we don’t at first consider them.

A day for birthdays

I just got home from a lovely little birthday party thrown for one of my Anarchist Guild Social Committee castmates, and I had been so intent on getting the fairy bread right and excited that we used electrostatic charge to stick some of the party balloons to a curtain that I almost forgot who else was born on February 12: Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, it’s true: America’s tallest president turns 200 today, and I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about variation in the human population…nah. I’m kidding! I want to talk about Charles Erasmus Darwin, because he’s 200 today as well.

What to say about Charles Darwin? He studied medicine, but didn’t complete the course because – according to various sources – he both found it boring and was afraid of blood. He came up with one of the most powerful scientific ideas of all time, but delayed publishing it for twenty years to study barnacles in infinite detail. (If you find that intriguing, I recommend Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle, probably the finest book written about Darwin.) He possessed a gentle nature, and detested all forms of cruelty to man and animal alike; he once tried to have a man freed from an asylum when a letter written by the patient came into his possession and seemed rational, though even the man himself latter admitted he was insane when he wrote it. And he greatly opposed vivisection, writing in a letter in 1871 that it was “a subject that makes me sick with horror” and cutting the discussion short “else I shall not sleep to-night.”

Even 100 years ago, scientists gathered to celebrate his contributions, and when he died in 1882, he was buried in Westminster Abbey a few feet from the grave of Isaac Newton. A century later in the age of genetics, molecular biology, and even the resurgence of not-quite-Lamarckism via epigenetics, his name is synonymous – for better or worse – with his legacy, the theory of evolution via natural selection. And now, 150 years after the publication of Origin of Species, his name and deeds are being discussed in hundreds if not thousands of blogs across the globe.

Not bad for a life’s work, eh?

February 12 is also – unofficially – “National Freedom to Marry Day” in the United States, which has been celebrated for a decade today. It’s tempting to think that the date was chosen on purpose, as a refutation to all those neo-conservatives who argue that homosexuality is “unnatural” (and who, in the States at least, are pretty likely to consider evolution pretty unnatural too) – but of course, with only 365 days to choose from, I’m sure there are plenty of other reasons. Probably it was convenient to make it coincide with an official holiday – Lincoln’s Birthday.

Whatever you did today, I hope you can take a moment to think about Charles Darwin, the man, as admirable a scientist and human being as ever there was. But spare a thought for Alfred Wallace while you’re at it; if it weren’t for his famous generosity, Darwin might be no more than a blip on the scientific radar, and in 2023 we’d be celebrating his 200th birthday instead.

The ginger science alliance

It’s not often you get to see a redheaded comedian speak about the beauty of the universe, and pictures from the Hubble space telescope in particular, and even less often that the person in question isn’t me. So it was lovely to be in the audience tonight to see Rod Quantock at the Ian Potter Gallery in Federation Square do just that.

If you don’t know who Rod is then I can only assume you’re either under the age of 20, you have no interest in the Australian comedy scene, or both. He recently did a show titled “First Man Standing” and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine he was one of the first stand-up comedians, at least in the modern sense, in Australia. If you’re my age or older, you’ll probably remember him from The Big Gig, Australia: You’re Standing In It, or possibly (and I apologise in advance, Rod) the Cap’n Snooze advertisements of the eighties.

Now, Rod being Rod, he didn’t exactly stay on topic; his style may be best described as lovingly rambly. But it was a grand half hour that featured, among other things, a model of the history of the universe contructed using only four human beings, one of whom played a dinosaur. (That might have been me, but I swear it was all Rod’s idea.) One thing he did mention, however, when sketching out his plan for establishing equilibrium in the ecologically disastrous times ahead,  was that humans are made of 80% water, and, perhaps inspired by Rod and Dr Karl, I’m going to go off on a tangent about that.

Like just about all living things of which we’re aware, we are made largely of water. There’s a lot of fluid in our bodies: blood, lymph, saliva, bile…all mostly water. Our cells are full of it, with anything up to 90% of their mass accounted for by H2O. That varies, of course; you or I have a large though uncertain number of cells in our bodies (it’s in the millions of millions), and they come in about 200 different types.

Interestingly, fat cells have a hugely lower water content than other cells: they’re only about 14% water, which is less even than bone, which is about 22% (“dry as a bone”, indeed!). This explains why in adult humans, the actual percentage of water is around 55%-65%, with men at the top of the range and women at the bottom. This varies quite a bit depending on body shape, size, health, fitness and how much you’ve had to drink. (There’s a pretty good breakdown of all this in the Wikipedia article on body water.)

Now, water is obviously pretty exciting and important for all of us, and when I say us, I mean “living things”. The Earth is in what’s known as the “habitable zone”, the narrow band in which a planet orbiting a star can have water in all three states: vapor, liquid and solid. The habitable zone varies quite a lot, depending on the size and temperature of a star; for hotter stars the zone is further away, for cooler stars it’s closer. Over a star’s lifetime the habitable zone will change, but since stars have long lives, there’s no reason to suppose life won’t usually have time to kick off and develop into complex forms. You know: like us.

The nice thing about all this rambling is that next year is both the International Year of Astronomy (much as 2005 was the Einstein International Year of Phsyics), and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species (not to mention the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin). Aside from Moby’s refrain that “we are all made of stars” (the elements heavier than Hydrogen – i.e. all of ’em – which are created via nuclear fusion in stars), physics and biology are, like all sciences, inextricably linked. It’s a bold time of exploration both inside and outside of ourselves; as Rod pointed out, not only will the successor to the Hubble space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, be launched, but we’re also learning more every year about genetics and also neurology. While I don’t think humans will run out of things to investigate any time soon, in the next decade or so we’re going to find out some very exciting stuff.

How sad, Rod pointed out, that we’ve managed this only at the precise time we’re all likely to die out…

The Man in the Lab Coat versus the Giant Squid

When I was in primary school, I guess I would have been about 6 or 7, one of my most prized possessions was a small, illustrated, abridged paperpack copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I must have read it 50 times; I even brought it in for one of my teachers to read to us, and when we dressed up as literary characters for Book Week (do kids still do that?), I came as Captain Nemo.

It’s true – I’ve been geeky all my life. But I like to think I was at least a cultured geek, with a love for Important Geek Literature. And even years later, after re-reading the full unabridged novel a few years ago and realising it’s largely just a list of interesting fish, I still remember the fight with the giant squid. It was, predictably, also my favourite part of the Disney film, in which a bizarrely upper-class Nemo played by James Mason fights off the world’s rubberiest monster with the help of Kirk Douglas as Ned Land. (I still love that movie, and it was the best birthday ever a few years ago when my Mum bought it for me on DVD.)

So you can imagine my excitement when a couple of weeks ago I headed down to Melbourne Museum to see them dissect a Giant Squid. Read more