Having a bad day? Think of an Emperor Penguin in June

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, penguins, emperor penguins, photography, antarctica

When wildlife photographer Lindsay McCrae was offered the chance to spend a winter in Antarctica filming Emperor Penguins for the BBC series Dynasties, he was newly married. He did his best to set the stage, and soften the blow, but when he told his wife it would be eleven months, she blew up. Given time to review, nearly two weeks later she told him it would be OK, they could work it out.

In My Penguin Year: Life Among the Emperors, McCrae takes us with him on his journey to the literal end of the Earth. A BBC program on Emperor Penguins had sparked his desire to photograph wildlife when he was a pre-teen, and now his ambition, to film the next documentary on their entire courting, breeding, and chick-raising season, was to be fulfilled.

Nothing can prepare someone for a year in Antarctica. Summers are brutal; the rest of the year grades from dreadful to impossible. He and two companions were stationed at Neumayer III, a German research station that sits on stilts atop an ice shelf in Atka Bay. The station may host 60 or more researchers and support crew in the summertime, but only 12 will overwinter. The place is ideal because it is within just a couple of miles of a section of the bay that freezes over thickly and then hosts a colony of 10,000 Emperor Penguins.

The author felt under enormous pressure to capture every behavior in which the birds engage. We read a lot about his volatile feelings as the comparatively balmy late summer weather turned to alternating storms and clear, but colder and colder weather as winter approached. He and his helpers needed to wait, and wait, and wait, for the sea ice to get thick enough for them to get to the birds. Only once the authorities deemed it safe could they actually begin filming penguins. Until then, McCrae had to content himself with framing footage of other things going on, plus icebergs, other sea birds flying about, and the occasional seal.

In addition, shortly before he left for Antarctica, his wife informed him she was pregnant, and he had to cope with his feelings about that. Modern technology allowed them to talk almost daily, which is a great improvement over worrying about one's child being born halfway across the planet, waiting for the mails to arrive (at Neumayer III, there is no mail service for six months!).

They managed to get onto the ice in time to film courtship behavior, mating, and eventually, egg-laying. Once the egg is laid, a female will carry it on her feet for a day or two, and almost reluctantly transfer it to her mate's feet. Then she scoots off to the sea some thirty miles to the north, to fatten up for the hatching and the intense feeding period that follows.

This is what egg incubation looks like in the late fall. The male birds are huddled against a light blizzard at -30°C (-22°F). That's rather balmy compared to midwinter. Were footage taken during a heavier blizzard, it would be total "white screen"; visibility is less than an inch.

At -40° (where C and F scales are the same), mercury freezes, and so do you. So does some camera equipment. Then it gets colder. The men all suffered a lot from being out there with the penguins during "milder" days, where they actually had a fighting chance to live through the conditions and get safely back to the station.

One interesting bit of behavior amused me: when the wind blows strongly from one side, the huddle of 5,000 incubating males moves slowly downwind. Birds on the upwind side, when they've had enough, work their way around the huddle to the lee side. When the weather clears, they make their way back to a spot near to where they were, but one less stained by their droppings. Surprisingly, when the cold is not quite so deep, penguins in the center of the huddle may begin to show signs of distress and squawk. They are overheating—the others pull back to let them cool off!

More than sixty days after the females left, they begin to return. Some chicks will have already hatched. The rest hatch over a couple of weeks. The pairs find one another again, and once the infant bird can be safely transferred, the female takes over. The males, who have lost half their weight, scoot north to feed. Once they return, a round-robin of feeding chicks and feeding themselves ensues until the chicks are old enough for both parents to be away at once for short feeding trips.

This cuteness overload is what it is all about, to a penguin.

There is a picture very like this in the book, but a printing error made it unusable here. This one is from this website by Art Wolfe.

Not all the chicks, and not all the adults, live through the late winter and spring. At one point a gully opened up by shifting ice partly filled with snow. Penguins began going down to get out of the wind and were trapped. They and their chicks would have died there. After a day of discussions and soul-searching, the film crew intervened with shovels and made a ramp for them to escape. The rescue is documented in this video, clipped from the documentary Dynasties:Emperor, the fruit of McCrae's work. When hatching and raising season ended, in November, the filmmakers could return home. McCrae had an infant son to bond with.

This has to be my favorite natural history book this year. It documents the incredible accomplishments of McCrae and his colleagues and friends Will Lawson and Stefan Christmann. While Antarctic work is much less dangerous than it was a half century or more ago, it is still arduous, exhausting, very dangerous, and utterly chilling. One cannot wear enough gear to prevent at least a bit of frost nip or frostbite. Hats off to these blokes!

Fantasy sports cost real cash

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sports, fantasy sports, gambling, wagering, business

My wild card selection this time is Billion Dollar Fantasy: The High Stakes Game Between FanDuel and DraftKings That Upended Sports in America, by Albert Chen. The book brings together three subjects that are way, way out of my wheelhouse: Fantasy Sports, Wagering, and Business.

I was surprised to learn that daily fantasy sports betting even existed, and amused to find that it was not considered gambling by legal authorities for more than twenty years. I just had to shake my head. I had heard of fantasy football and fantasy baseball, and from what little I heard, they were the season-long variety. I didn't know fantasy sports was a huge field for illegal betting. Had I given it any thought, I could have figured that one out. The cash flow of legal gambling in America is about $160 billion. I expect that illegal gambling is similar in size, or larger.

The book has the story of three businesses among a multitude: seasonal fantasy sports went on for a long time, and continues to be popular, but probably more so among fans of middle and older age. Once technology allowed, some hyper-fans began to build the infrastructure to support game-by-game fantasy lineups. Many such ventures were started. The three groups who obtained major venture capital funding, so as to act as middlemen and facilitate this kind of wagering on a huge scale, were DraftSheet, DraftKings, and FanDuel. Within a few years, DraftKings absorbed DraftSheet, and then there were two. Between them, annual spending for the advertising needed to build a national base approached $1 billion by the middle 2010's.

With that kind of money flowing around, the business overcame the fan-ness. Ironically, FanDuel was founded by five Britons who don't care much for sports. They were entirely into it for the business, for the money. A further irony; they didn't manage to hang on to much of the cash. A facilitator is like a garden hose: full of water when in use, then it empties quickly.

Several trends underlay the drama of this 15+ year narrative. One is the changing regulatory environment, including a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that effectively legalized sports wagering, including fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports (amazingly, they went against strong lobbying by casinos); the matter is remanded to the states to determine what to allow. State-by-state lawmaking is going on right now. Another is a growing demographic of people who have no patience at all. The product of choice among younger bettors is moving from game-by-game to play-by-play ("Will pitcher X throw a curve next?" "Will QB Y pass or run?" "Will cager Z try for a 3-pointer?" "Will skater W pass or shoot?"). The digital infrastructure now exists to support it. Some also stack their bets, with dozens of wagers outstanding at any moment, and certain ploys depending on the outcome of others.  And another is the increasing comfort of venture capitalists to fund FanDuel and its clones and competitors.

Here's the basic business proposition of FanDuel, circa 2014: John Doe and Sam Hill, facilitated by FD's software, have entered a "snake draft" (drafting alternately, and they can't draft the same player); they agree on a point spread for the outcome. Each puts $10 into the pot. The winner gets $19 and FD gets $1. Multiply by 100 million on any game day of your choice. It's amusing that none of the big facilitation companies has yet turned a profit. Advertising is expensive!

I find the entire situation saddening, however. Maybe I don't have the betting gene or something. But I do have three friends whose lives have been damaged or ruined by gambling. One man's marriage ended because he spent all his free time at casinos, places his wife tried to like but soon found abhorrent. Another man has no social life outside the casino, and remains single. A third got into high-stakes poker and other "games", and spent two years in prison for stealing more than a half million from an escrow fund he had access to, to pay off his losses.

The adage to remember: Professional gamblers don't gamble. They know how they will beat you before they meet you.

It was interesting to get a long look into these things. I was glad when the book ended and I could come up for air. One of those experiences I am glad I had, and don't care to repeat.

A former SSR out-spiders Russia

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning


Well, looky here! Somebody has been busy the past couple of days.

Interestingly, the darkest green available on the "Audience" chart isn't seen on Russia, but on the little spot below Crimea.

The specialty chart below shows who…


Turkmenistan!

Russia is no slouch, hitting in under two days almost twice the score the US obtained in the full week, but the former Turkmen SSR topped them by 74 hits. Nice going!

Are humans evolving faster than ever?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolution, anthropology, human evolution, civilization

Consider a plant of the desert southwest of the U.S., the creosote bush, Larrea tridentata. It is host to several species of insects that can live nowhere else. One is the creosote bush walkingstick, Diapheromera covilleae. You can read at arizonensis.org that, while the creosote bush has inhabited North American deserts for less than 12,000 years, these species endemic to it, including the walkingstick shown here, evolved their special adaptations to life only on this plant within that time frame. The image is from that article.

In the book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending use this insect and others endemic to the creosote bush to demonstrate that evolution can happen on scales that correspond to recorded history. About the time that humans began farming in the Middle East, members of a species of American walkingstick already present began to prowl the newly-invasive creosote bushes for prey. While people were learning to live with agriculture, and developing it over and over again around the world, these insects evolved better and better camouflage, and habits better suited to the way the plant's twigs move in the wind, so that they are now unable to live elsewhere.

The aim of these authors is not, however, to provide a catalog of rapidly-evolving insects, but to set a few of them, and other creatures including birds and mammals—all of which show evidence of rapid evolution—alongside humans, to indicate that we, also, can evolve on such time scales.

Accepted dogma among most scientists has been that humans stopped evolving when they developed civilization. Civilization is thought to protect humans from the selective pressures that drive evolutionary changes. People who once would have died from many causes now live because of better sanitation, medical care, and a richer food supply. For me at least, long ago, a moment's thought was sufficient for me to realize that this just changed the style of selective pressure we experience. I concluded that in the past several thousand years, humans have most likely been evolving in a direction more dependent on such systems of care than before. These authors reach the same conclusion.

When I was young, the early humans just prior to the modern era were called Cro-Magnon, and I got the impression that if you put one is a suit or dress, it would be hard to distinguish that person from anyone else. Cro-Magnon humans are now called "Early Modern Humans" (EMH's), which encompasses a wider array of fossils than those that were known in the late 1800's through the early 1900's, when the textbooks I read were published. I have since learned that the average EMH was stronger than 99.9% of us (even the women were stronger than most modern men!), with heavier bones, thicker skulls, and a brain about 10% larger than the modern average. They had slightly larger jaws, with teeth of very similar size to ours, so they would not have had problems with wisdom teeth, as so many of us have. (FYI: I had no trouble with wisdom teeth, but more than half of my classmates in high school had to have theirs removed).

We have been taught that it takes a few hundred thousand, or millions of years, for significant evolution to take place. But some scientists, including one of my favorite science authors, Stephen Jay Gould, promoted "punctuated evolution": as long as the environment is comparatively stable, the species that live within it don't change, but when environment changes, such as at the beginning or end of an ice age, species then evolve rapidly so that new species develop which are better adapted to the new situation. I read almost everything by Gould, and I don't recall that he put a time frame on "rapid". The authors of this book come closer to doing so, contending that measurable changes in various human groups have taken place in "a few" thousand years, probably less than 5,000.

What could drive evolution at a more rapid pace? How could new and favorable mutations be gathered at a rate that would allow a group of humans to adapt to something new and different, in just 50-100 generations, and perhaps much less in some cases? One key factor that these authors stress repeatedly is the great expansion of population that resulted from agriculture. A larger number of people means that the little, random mutations that happen in every one of us are equally larger in number. Apparently, this is not too hard.

Consider lactose tolerance. The default condition is that adults and adolescents don't drink milk, so they don't need to digest lactose. Thus the enzymes needed to do so aren't produced in most adults and teens. But the domestication of cattle by various groups of people made quantities of cow milk available, and other animals' milk, such as horse or goat, were also available among other groups. At least four times, in different places, a mutation or two occurred that allowed the continued production of enzymes that carry out digestion of lactose throughout life. All occurred within the past 10,000 years.

Think about it. A herder might gather some milk to nourish an orphaned calf or kid. He might taste it himself; it would be a little sweet and taste good. But he would usually suffer discomfort or indigestion soon after, and would not try that again. But maybe not. Initially, scattered families here or there would be able to digest milk. This added source of nutrition would result in larger families for such folks. Over time, such a favorable genetic trait would become widespread and could even dominate a population. However, populations that never developed ranching or herding have very few members who can digest lactose. All of my relatives are milk drinkers. My wife is Japanese, and she and her family also drink milk. Most Japanese don't, and they can't without discomfort. My wife's family must have ancestors that were herders. The primary milk used in Japanese households is soy milk, and most people of the generation that is now in their 60's and older know how to make it. Younger folks buy it at the store because they are too busy earning a salary to learn traditional skills.

Lactose tolerance is one of many examples of recent evolutionary changes in many human populations. And this matter brings up a wider view: If a large cohort of people look distinctive, there is a genetic reason for it. Although the human species is one species, and there are no "breeding barriers" between any human groups, the concept of "race" is really an oversimplification of a blatant reality. Any cohesive group ("Tribe" is a common term) that doesn't outbreed with other groups will become a distinctive group (better adapted to a different environment, perhaps), and it isn't hard for people in "Tribe A" to recognize people of "Tribe B" on sight alone, even if all cultural accouterments and accessories are removed.

The last chapter touches on a sensitive subject: can there be a "Tribe" of humans that are smarter than average? Consider the controversy that erupted over The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray. This is a very non-PC subject! But, face it, folks, facts are facts and truth is truth. There does happen to be a group of people whose average IQ is 12-15 points above the average for all people. Though they number only about 11 million worldwide, about 1/7th of a percent of the human race, their members have earned more than 20% of all Nobel Prizes. Of course, an average implies a range of values. There are dumber ones also, just not as many of them. The proportion of them that are smarter than average is larger than that proportion in humanity generally.

Who are these people? The Ashkenazi Jews, usually just called "European Jews". They comprise 3/4 of the total Jewish population of the world. Einstein was one. So was Stephen Jay Gould.

The authors present the case for a history that could have produced such a result. One key element is almost total in-group marriage; they strongly discourage marriage to non-Jews. They experienced nearly a thousand years of persecution in Europe. For much of that time they were forbidden from engaging in most trades. They were allowed to have certain "professional" occupations, and money-lending was but one. Those who were most adept at managerial and accounting skills prospered and had larger families. Both the Jews and their neighbors favored large families, but a more prosperous family will raise more children to adulthood than a poor one, even if the number born is the same. This factor alone could result in a "smartening" of the European Jews over those centuries.

There is another factor that the authors don't touch (maybe they avoided it purposely): the Holocaust under Nazism. Many, many Jews left Nazi-controlled, areas, or countries they were soon to control, before the end of the 1930's. I reckon they tended to be the smarter, better-educated ones. Of those left behind, half or more were murdered by the Nazis and left no descendants. This probably boosted the average IQ even more.

Whether or not such processes were the deciding factors, the fact remains that worldwide IQ testing has shown that average IQ and the spread of IQ scores are practically universal, with the glaring exception being the Ashkenazi Jews. (Just by the way, the letters n-a-z-i "Ashkenazi" are in no way related to "Nazi", which is an acronym formed from German words meaning National Socialism.)

For those who think there is no evolution anyway, don't sweat it. I'd be surprised if you read this far anyway. But for those who accept evolution as "the way biology works", this book helps us understand that humans haven't been somehow extracted from Nature, but still form a part of it. The environments that we have built for ourselves haven't made us "not natural", just natural in a different way. We continue to evolve, and it would be interesting to be able to look forward another 10,000 years, to see what directions have been taken by the various tribes of mankind.

Lakes for all seasons and reasons

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, limnology, lakes

I considered starting with a definition, that limnology is the scientific study of lakes, but I realize that "scientific" adds a redundancy. "Study", all by itself, is scientific. Whether we then draw conclusions scientifically, or some other way, is another matter.

Still Waters: The Secret World of Lakes, by Curt Stager, helped me understand that lakes are like the proverbial duck: seemingly serene on the surface, but paddling like mad underneath. Thus, a duck gliding along expresses the reality of the pond. A lot is going on under there!

"Lake" refers to the larger water bodies that are not oceans. The related words "pond", "pool", and even "tarn" refer to smaller ones, but I know of no clear dividing line. The state of Minnesota is called "The land of 10,000 lakes". Perhaps for that reason, in the area around Lake Minnetonka, a pretty big lake at 23 square miles, almost everything big enough to float a canoe and paddle around in is called a lake. By contrast, one of America's most famous lakes, Walden Pond in Massachusetts, has an area of 61 acres and is something over half a mile long. Yet it is called a pond. My own criterion is this: a pond is small enough for an ordinary person to own in its entirety. So if it fits on a farm, for example, I think of it as a pond.

At the upper range of sizes, the largest lakes are too big to see across. The largest, the Caspian Sea, is 745 miles long and has an area of 143,000 square miles. However, its water is brackish; it used to be an arm of an ocean. The largest freshwater lake is Superior, centered on the US/Canada border. Its length is 383 miles, and its area nearly 32,000 square miles. The deepest lake, Baikal in Russia, is more than a mile deep. While it is of similar length to Superior (395 miles), it is much narrower, but because of its depth, contains more than twice as much water.

The largest lake of my experience is Erie, between northern Ohio and Canada. With length of 241 miles and area of 9,900 square miles, it seems oceanic to me. It is not possible to see across it. From points west of Cleveland, Ohio across to Point Pelee, Ontario, the distance is about 33.5 miles. The curvature of the Earth makes the water midway across "rise" 187 feet above shoreline points at either end. There aren't any near-shore hills high enough to see over that; there would have to be one at each end of the sight line.

The author's studies of lakes are pretty comprehensive. I used to joke that the bailiwick of geophysics, my primary area of expertise, is "from the center of the Earth to the edge of space, and a little beyond." However, geophysics has little to do with life. Limnology, on the other hand, encompasses not only the geology and geomorphology and geophysics of the land under a body of water, but also its biology and chemistry and hydrology (how water moves).

One aim of the book is to show the impact people have had on lakes. We tend to think of human impact in Eurocentric terms, as though every lake on Earth was pristine until the colonial empires were formed between 500 and 200 years ago. The fallacy of this was brought home to me when I visited relatives in North Carolina, some 50 years ago. My uncle-in-law has collected arrowheads and other prehistoric stone tools in every one of the fifty United States. We went to the shore of a pond near his home, where he dug around a bit, sifted some of the soil, and brought forth a few yellowish flint arrow points. He said they were about 8,000 years old. He told the story he could read in the shape of the landscape. He had known where to dig because it was a good spot to put a tent or cabin above the shoreline, with good sight lines. He pointed out another few places that would probably have been repeatedly visited by the people of that time, plus or minus a few thousand years. The people that lived in the area would have fished in the pond and used it and connecting streams for transportation via whatever kind of small boats they had. Their wastes also ended up in the pond, changing its chemistry, often in seasonal ways.

The author of Still Waters uses seven lakes or lake areas to tell the stories of how lakes change through time, in particular, how the fish, insects, and other living things in a lake go about their business...or not, if some humans happen to decide to poison a lake and replace the fish with some they'd rather have there; or if they decide to drain a shallow lake; or build a dam to raise its water level. All these things happen to thousands of lakes. The "game fishing" business is especially troubling, because people would rather fish for trout, bass, or even crappie, rather than the things they call "trash fish". It is pretty well known (finally!) that many, perhaps most, lakes contain one or a few fish species that are endemic, meaning that they occur nowhere else. A chapter on Heritage Lakes tells us of one of them, one that hasn't been (yet!) poisoned out or "over-loved".

The deadest of dead lakes, the Dead Sea of Israel and Jordan, has no fish or insects living in it, but it does have a few species of extremophile bacteria (or archaea) that occur nowhere else. A project being considered by the two countries, to create a hydropower facility that uses Red Sea water, flowing more than 1,100 vertical feet over the 100 mile distance to the Dead Sea, is certain to change or eliminate them.

I have ruminated too long of matters that are mostly peripheral to the author's concerns. He aims for more people to realize just how much we have changed every one of the hundred-plus million lakes on this Earth, and how much we continue to do so. The fascinating stories of the lakes, and their histories as told by studies of the sediments that line them, underscore first, just how dependent we are on lakes, and secondly, just how dependent they are on us. The lakes of Earth, even the most remote, are much different from what they would be were we not here.