Friday Fun Fact! I am deeply sorry I missed your fun fact last week, but I was stricken, nay pounded down by a horrid flu virus. But this week, I bring you things which make you go, "OMFG, that's huge!"
The Atlantic Giant Squid's eye can be as large as 15.75 inches wide. All the better to watch you with, my dear.
The largest flying animal was the pterosaur which lived 70 million years ago. This reptile had a wing span of 39 feet and weighed 190-250 pounds. That's like a flying black bear!
The tentacles of the giant Arctic jellyfish can reach 120 feet in length. There is no cookie shelf too high for baked goods safety!
In a full grown rye plant, the total length of fine root hairs may reach 6600 miles. That would cross the US. Twice.
The world's largest amphibian is the giant Japanese salamander (left). It can grow up to 5 ft. in length. A salamander that can eat your leg is just...cool.
Friday Fun Fact!
You are already experts on
counter-current exchange and the way in which it allows efficient exchange of heat from veins to arteries. It also allows animals which operate in a low-oxygen environment to maximize the amount of oxygen in the blood using the same principle of running oxygen rich blood in parallel and opposite to oxygen poor blood in order to exchange the gas across vessel walls.
This is a really big deal if you are, say, a migrating bar-headed goose (right). These striking birds fly at 29,000 feet, confidently flapping over the peaks of the Himalayas. We're talking an altitude where the air is so thin, helicopters can't even fly. They need these special physiological adaptations just to get to the other side of that inconveniently placed mountain range.
While these geese are certainly the trophy-winners at altitude, they are not the only high flyers out there. An airliner once struck a mallard at 21,000 feet above Nevada. Evidence of pintail ducks and black-tailed godwits have been found at 16,400 feet on a Himalayan glacier. Even the tiny, delicate Monarch butterfly has been sighted at 11,000 feet up in the air.
Next time you see migrating critters passing overhead, take a moment to appreciate what it takes to get them there and the astounding achievements of which they are capable without even flinching.
No Friday Fun Fact for you! I will be away all weekend,
drinking working hard at an aquatic conservation conference. And debating my latest puzzle: why does science insist we write in the driest, most boring fashion imaginable? Do they deliberately try to create a body of literature so inaccessible to any person with a spark of imagination? Every time I try to slip in the smallest of colourful adjectives, I am slapped down by the mighty hand of the Personality Police. God forbid someone might actually have an emotion, or even worse, smile, while reading a report. For we must maintain the harmonic, transparent, joyous relationship that science currently has with the public and within its own ranks. By the way, yes, that clanking sound you hear IS in fact my eyes rolling all the way back in my skull at that last...
But it's ok to drink and fly. Friday Fun Fact!
We already know that
ants always fall to the right when they are drunk. The logical next step is to fund further research into "when animals behave like frat boys." I can almost see the giggling researchers sitting around the table, having finally found a sponsor who will apparently fund ANYthing. "Oh, oh, how about bats? Let's see if we can get them drunk enough to crash into things when they fly."
And lo and behold, at least in the Western hemisphere, drunk bats are still able to fly just fine, thank you, as well as operate heavy machinery and avoid drunk dialing ex-cavemates.
If only we could all be so evolved. I need to find out who is funding all this critical research...
Maybe someday I will have the energy to go the whole topic in depth, although I'm not sure there's really a point. But I have to say one thing about this whole climate change business:
WEATHER IS NOT THE SAME THING AS CLIMATE!!
Weather = (noun) the state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, cloudiness, moisture, pressure, etc. This refers to a LOCALIZED area. I.e. the weather in any place you happen to be
Climate = (noun) the
composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness, and winds, throughout the year,
averaged over a series of years.
Therefore, just because it happens to be quite cold where you are right now, does NOT mean that global AVERAGE temperature is not increasing. There's a tricky little thing about hemispheres: it may be damn cold in Maryland right now but it's close to 100 degrees in Darwin, Australia at the moment. So someone there is sweating their tail off wondering why the world is so damn HOT.
The top ten hottest years on record include 2009, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 1998, and 1997 and the past decade was the hottest in recorded history. A dump of snow on a fraction of one continent does not affect this.
I am also instituting a new rule in society: if you do not know how to perform analytical statistical tests on a data set or correctly interpret a logistic or logarithmic plot, you do not get to have an opinion about climate change data and its veracity.
*stomps out of room grumbling*
Friday Fun Fact!
One simplistic way to divide up the animal kingdom is to split it into "warm-blooded" (capable of regulating their internal body temperature, i.e. mammals) and "cold-blooded" (reliant on external conditions to warm or cool the body, i.e. reptiles). However, like seemingly every categorical system ever devised on earth, black and white are interspersed with shades of grey.
Like oceanic tuna. In this group, bluefin tuna have been most successful in the art of keeping one's core muscles warm for high-speed swimming in cold ocean currents. So how does an animal with no true thermoregulatory mechanism achieve this? By the sleek and efficient workings of counter-current exhange.
This relies on a simple principle of physics: that heat always travels from warmer places to colder places. You experience this every day in a thousand different ways. For example, get cold then climb into a hot bath. The heat from the water will travel into your body and the surrounding cool air. Your body gets warmer, but the water in the tub gets steadily cooler.
Bluefins use this to great advantage. All of their arteries are set up so they flow from the core of the body out towards the skin and extremeties while all the veins flow from the outside in. The two sets of blood vessels run in parallel and lie close to each other. As a result, as warm arterial blood (heated by muscle activity and food metabolism) passes cool venous blood, heat leaves the arterial blood and is transferred to the venous blood. Heat exchange is greatest when the difference in temperature between the two vessels is greatest, so when the arterial blood has 100% of its warmth and it is next to venous blood that has 0% of its warmth, a lot of heat will be transferred. It looks a lot like this:
So what you get is blood steadily losing warmth as it runs out of the core. Blood traveling back into the core is steadily gaining warmth. Net result: the warmth stays close to the core and is not lost to the surrounding, heat-sucking water.
It's a life-saver. Cool muscles are slow to respond to demands for movement so if you keep your muscles warm, you have a better chance of escaping things that want to eat you and you can swim farther and faster in search of food in a giant ocean. Birds use the same system to reduce heat loss though their long skinny legs and to keep oxygen levels in their lungs and flight muscles high at altitude.
A certain song keeps popping into my head: "AH-AH-AH-AH, stayin' alive, stayin' alive..."
An Award??!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
| Author:
eventer79
Wow, so WWWT has been humbled by the granting of the "Happy 101" award from the great new blog,
Anything Fits A Naked Man (which I was relieved to discover had nothing to do with naked men). I am not sure this technically counts as an award for any particular type of excellence, but I certainly do appreciate being included on someone's list of noteworthiness! So thank you so much to AFANM and all of my, like, four readers!
Here's the rules:
Copy award pic and add to your post.
List 10 things that make you happy.
Tag 10 bloggers who brighten your day and notify them of their win.
Link back to the blogger who gave you the award in your post.
Link to the new award winners.
10 things that make me happy:
1. Looking at
my horse. Petting him, breathing the scent of his neck, riding him, sharing a long gaze with him. He is peace, patience, generosity of spirit, courage, and freedom.
2. Walking in the woods and hearing nothing but birdsong and the rustle of leaves at my feet.
3. Watching animals eat. I don't know why this entrances me so, but there is something of fulfillment and contentment in watching a creature eat its meal and the many interesting behaviours that go along with it.
4. Really bad silly jokes. One of my favourites: Two muffins were sitting in an oven. One said to the other, "Man, is it just me or is it getting hot in here?" The other one turned and said, "OMG, TALKING MUFFIN!!!!"
5. Wildflowers. Random and exuberant splashes of colour, even in the most unexpected places.
6. The call of migrating cranes. Something about their high, wild warble always makes me smile. It's such a unique sound -- you can hear some sandhill crane calls
here.
7. Bluebirds. I always smile at bluebirds too. I can't explain why, it's another gut feeling of happiness when I see them.
8. Really good music. I don't mean the kind you hear on the radio. I mean real MUSIC. The kind that composers make for movies and orchestras. Swelling crescendos that fill up your whole body.
9. Baby animals. So cliche, but so true. I can't see one, not even ugly babies like vultures or koalas, and NOT laugh with their joy and play.
10. A really good book that I can relish and mentally roll around in.
And ten blogs that give me great pleasure to read, in no particular order:
1. TNC's
Cool Green Science2.
Along Life's Highway3.
The Mugwump Chronicles4.
The Literary Horse5.
I Is Roxie6.
Eventing Nation7.
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster8.
I Can Has Cheezburger9.
When Lillies Fly10.
National Geographic Blogs
The Atlantic Giant Squid's eye can be as large as 15.75 inches wide. All the better to watch you with, my dear.
