Morning Ed: Wildlife {2017.06.27.T}
[W1] It’s like a folding chair or a guitar, except silk for a spider.
[W2] Those pictures of goats on cliffs always weird me out. Goats on trees similarly. Turns out, they’re useful up there.
[W3] Turtles are becoming collateral damage in Britain’s hunger for prawns.
[W4] For $15,000, you can help scientists watch sharks.
[W5] Attack of the giant squid! Also, sea pickles invade our Pacific Coast!
[W6] Return of the library cat. And introducing the tall ship cats.
[W7] Meanwhile, pumas really hate Rush Limbaugh.
[W8] Dracula vs bears.
[W9]
Elephant family save drowning calf by pushing it to shallow end of the pool. Wonderful. pic.twitter.com/ucIPhScZZK
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) June 20, 2017
[W9] Notice, toward the end of the video, a third elephant behind a fence. He’s acting agitated as well. He wants to come help but cannot.
[W4 15K is bit much. IIRC, on my honeymoon, we took a re purposed research sub down the coral wall to 1000 feet. It was only a 1.5 hour trip though. Only cost like 300 dollars…in 90s money.
[W6] Do NOT mess with Libary Cat (mis spell intentional)Report
A thousand feet is rather deep for one of those tourist subs, both because that’s a significant amount of pressure, and that you really can’t see anything with the ambient natural light below 200 ft or so.Report
Indeed. It wasn’t a tourist sub, like The Atlantis, though, but a re purposed research sub. In fact that difference was pointed out when we boarded. We were both instructed on how to blow the emergency ballast tanks to surface and to use the radio to call for help.
The sub had lights so when we hit 1000 feet, the pilot turned them on and we looked a crinoids. Then we started the accent and he turned the lights off and we went through the deep sponge layers where the only light was purple. It was a kick ass trip.Report
Ah, that’s neato beano. I only was able to get aboard to UH research submersibles when they were still aboard their mothership.
Eta I am surprised the economics worked out, because those things are like airplanes in that after some finite number of dive cycles, the cyclic stress buildup makes them unusable.Report
How Cats Used Humans to Conquer the World
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/cat-domination/530685/Report
W7 – funny because 9 years ago pumas were almost entirely the invention of Sean Hannity.Report
W3: expect prawns to be marketed as turtle safe pretty soon.Report
W7 – Talk radio is often aggressive. It makes me question the value of the study. How would pumas respond to more soothing voices?Report
they need to play an NPR announcer as a control.Report
“Why are the pumas rolling their eyes? I’ve never seen that behavior in nature.”Report
Oh, and I wasn’t being facetious in my original comment. Animals respond differently to different inflections. Any pet owner knows that, but it isn’t limited to domesticated animals. Most talk radio hosts have sharp punctuation – you can hear the same thing on sports talk radio. The idea is to provoke a response. The people who created the study went for an easy hook by using talk radio, but it’s at least possible that a softer human voice could elicit a different response, thus calling the whole study into doubt.Report
Yeah, I’ve seen pet owners do the “Who’s a big stupid dumb awful dog who poops on the floor” thing in a nice tone of voice, and the dog just acts overcome with joy. It’s tone and inflection, not words (well, maybe other than a FEW words – for a while, my parents had a cat where you could not say the word “tuna” in its hearing)
I dunno. I think it would be amusing to try different media things on them, like the recording of Samuel L. Jackson reading that joke-baby book, “Go the (fish) to Sleep”
Really, if they’re looking at words vs. tone, it needs to be the same words read in different tones. As it is, this is kinda “Mythbusters” level science, and I don’t mean that in a good way.Report
When my sister’s doggie was younger, she would turn on the station that carried Clark Howard and Neil Boortz when she had to leave the house, and that seemed to stop the doggie from tearing things up while she was away.Report
Hmmm speaking of turtles McConnell has agreed to put off the AHCA vote until after the July break. On one hand this is a climb down from what appeared to be an effort to pressure his Senators into passing the thing on short notice and this break will give opponents more time to jaw-jaw the law and it’s highly unlikely it’s going to get more popular the more the electorate learns of it.
On the other hand this is basically the same way it was passed in the house: fiasco train wreck, opponents bask in Schadenfreude then, surprise, the thing emerges from the crater like a burning train and barrels over the finish line.
On the other-other hand this time opponents are wise to that maneuver.Report
I don’t know. It seems like absolute maximum outrage is enough to sway a Senator’s vote, but anything less than that causes them to proceed along party lines. Absolute maximum outrage is really tough to keep going, so I’m guessing it won’t be long until McConnell realizes that he can just wait a news cycle or two and try again successfully without changing anything. This may just be him figuring that out.Report