Still Life with Eels

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, fisheries, eels, poaching

When I was a child we visited tide pools in southern California, where my brothers and I would collect not only shells but a few living starfish, which we salted and dried for display. Sometimes we saw people using a putty knife to pry abalones off the rocks, which they would take home and cook to eat. I remember my mother telling us, "Don't take too many things. Leave some for others. If everyone takes these things, one day there will be none left." At the time I couldn't imagine that.

That was more than sixty years ago. About twenty years later the tide pools bore signs forbidding collecting. A few years after that they were closed; visiting was prohibited. Too much had been taken, and the sea life needed to recover. To date, the pools haven't been re-opened.

Now, living near the east coast, primarily the shores of New Jersey and Delaware, I find precious few seashells when we go to the ocean. Not being a fisherman, I don't notice the prevalence of fish, but others tell me that catching your limit takes longer than it used to. In certain seasons we do see fish in the rivers, but one thing I have never seen: eels. They migrate at night, and only in certain seasons. Anyway, if I am out at night, it is to do astronomy, not to look for animals. I am told that, during the seasons of migration, there are a great many eels, an uncountable multitude. Yet, fisheries reports indicate that what we see today is a tiny fraction of the numbers seen just one or two generations ago.

So, there are still eels. After reading Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell, I wonder, how close are we to exterminating them? The title of this image is the title of this review: Still Life with Eels. For the time being.

The fashion for eating eels comes and goes. Right now unagi (the Japanese word for Eel, and the currently popular name for eels-for-eating, particularly in sushi) is wildly popular. So popular that around half the unagi eaten around the world, particularly in Japan and America, originated with poached elvers.

Why do I say "originated with"? Eels have an astounding life cycle, more like a butterfly than a vertebrate. In early works of natural history, several different species were named, but they were all eventually found to be stages in the life of the eel.

This diagram, from ResearchGate, is worth considering in detail:

Begin at upper right, with spawning. This has never been seen, so the drawing is speculative. For American and European eels, spawning takes place in the Sargasso Sea. The eel larva is at first a tiny transparent thing a lot like a flatworm, called a leptocephalus, which means "small head". Nobody knows what they eat. Once they get a little bigger they become rounder but remain transparent, so they are called "glass eels". In this form they migrate from somewhere in the Sargasso Sea to the mouth of a river, a distance of 2,000 to 4,000 miles. Near the end of this journey they transform into elvers and begin to migrate upstream. Whether they go fully into freshwater or remain in an estuarine environment, they transform again into yellow eels. After a few years, for males, or up to thirty years for females, they become adults as silver eels and begin to migrate downstream. From this time they do not eat until they reach the Sargasso Sea to spawn. After spawning, the emaciated adults presumably die and sink to the ocean floor, or get snarfed up by carnivorous fish on the way down.

American and European eels haven't been successfully induced to spawn in captivity. Hormone treatments have rarely made a female produce eggs, and the eggs can be fertilized by suitably treated males, but the larvae don't live more than a matter of hours or a few days. However, the Chinese have perfected methods for raising river-caught elvers to adult size. This has led to a still-growing trade in elvers. The price has followed a roller-coaster as the market has shifted over the decades. The price of elvers is in the thousands of dollars per pound range at present. Eel dealers carefully, but very quickly!, send them to the Chinese eel farms. The adult eels are re-imported to America or Europe.

Elver prices are so high that poaching abounds. The Fish & Wildlife Service in America have been able to make a little dent in the trade, but are nowhere near stopping it. This is complicated by treaties with Native American tribes, which assert their rights over the fisheries in their territories. However, in Maine in particular, where the book is focused, the quantity of elvers fished by non-Natives, under licensed quotas, is many times greater than the Native American fishery. The fact remains that the biomass of American eels is probably less than 1/10th what it was thirty or forty years ago, and much, much less than it was in pre-Colonial times. Like nearly every fish stock worldwide, only a few percent remains. Humans love to eat fish, and we are loving them to extinction.

Ms Shell writes of the actions and attitudes of many players and stakeholders in this drama, including an American who is usually just known as "Sara", who has succeeded in setting up an eel farm in America, where many had failed in the past. Also including some of the eel experts who happen to also be leading poachers…or they were, prior to being prosecuted and in some cases, jailed. There are still too many prominent folks who say there are more than enough eels. To anyone who isn't profiting from the trade in elvers and eels, this is clearly not so. The book ends in ambiguity and hope.

Before closing, I need to correct a misapprehension by the author about sushi. Like many Americans, she thinks of sushi as raw fish. That is actually sashimi. Sushi, broadly speaking, is "rice plus seaweed plus lots of other things, served cold." Some of those "other things" include a few kinds of sashimi. At a sashimi restaurant they don't usually serve sushi, just a few kinds of fish with rice on the side and other side ingredients. Even there, eel is not served raw. Very few kinds of fish are served raw, and shellfish such as shrimp, and also octopus and squid, are always cooked. 

At a sushi restaurant, the raw fish is usually one of several species of tuna, and in American sushi restaurants salmon may also be served raw. I haven't seen salmon served raw in Japan (but I haven't been there for several years, so maybe that has changed). The reason for this care is parasites. Tuna and other predatory fish may have parasitic worms in them, but they are large enough for the sashimi chef to see and to remove. Many kinds of fish have smaller parasites that are harder, or economically impossible, to remove (it's usually done with a hook similar to a crochet hook). Still, the process isn't always perfect. At an Asian buffet restaurant in America that includes sushi, I never take the pieces with raw fish; I don't want to need to be dewormed! Finally, the kinds of sushi called "rolls" usually include vegetables and strips of scrambled eggs, and often contain no fish. A "California roll" has eggs, carrots, avocado, and mushrooms. No fish. So, while unagi sushi is very popular, not many know that the eel is always cooked. It isn't safe to eat raw.

Greenland was once green

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geoscience, ice science, ice drilling, ice coring, greenland, ice caps, climate change

This is the rig
That drilled the ice
Down into the soil
That proved the land
Was free of ice,
Less than a million years ago.

The climate then
Was like today's
But CO₂
Was half so much.
It shows that it
Could happen again:
It's really up to us.

When the Ice is Gone: What the Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future by Paul Bierman concludes with a prognosis for human civilization: Get ready for tremendous upheavals, no matter what we do; we can easily make things worse, or with effort mitigate the pain but not eliminate it.

Dr. Bierman has worked in Greenland and around the world. He brings us the history of Greenland, and particularly the US/Danish military efforts to establish DEW-Line-extension radar stations and under-ice military encampments during the Cold War.

Don't know what is/was the Distant Early Warning Line? I grew up knowing about it, plus the two Lines closer in, that were intended to detect ballistic missiles coming over the polar regions from Russia. We also had periodic tests of the radio warning system that a DEW Line alert would trigger. We would then have 15 or so minutes to prepare for nuclear hell to rain down. We practiced in school, to duck under our desks and hold our legs ("and kiss your ass goodbye," we said under our breaths).

Ice is hard to live on or in. A light touch is necessary, so the Inuit and other northern peoples manage it. A military is not known for having a light touch. Ice at any temperature above -40° (either C or F; that's the crossover temperature) slowly flows under pressure. The warmer it is, the faster it flows. The tunnels and other under-ice structures needed to be maintained by crews of ice trimmers because the walls close in at least several inches yearly, and the floor heaves, etc., etc. The Army put a lot of effort and buckets of money into studying the properties of Greenland ice (and ice in other places, though they are not the focus of the book). One effort was deep drilling.

It took a few decades to learn how to drill into the ice and extract a core. Drilling makes friction which causes heating, so there needs to be a "drill fluid" that is at least as dense as ice, to keep the drill hole from closing around the drill shaft and capturing the drill string and bit. If that happens all you can do is move over and start a new hole, with new equipment. Various drill fluids were used. The most effective were based on diesel oil with various additives to make it more dense and less corrosive to the equipment. To this day, if you go to one of the ice core storage facilities, such as the one in Copenhagen, the cores stink of diesel oil and other noxious materials.

Camp Century, situated atop almost a mile of ice, housed the first drill rig, shown above, to extract ice cores, not only to the base of the ice, but tens of feet into the sediment beneath, which at the time was a type of permafrost called "permacrete": just as hard to drill as concrete, but with ice binding everything together. The story is told in loving detail, and it was a truly heroic effort. The hole was completed in early July 1966.

Here a mystery intervenes. For several decades, a dog-in-the-manger scientist stingily parceled out bits of ice core to scientists he favored, and the below-the-ice material was ignored. Finally that material was discovered among some odds-and-ends sent to an ice laboratory in Copenhagen, and in 2019 the author and a large collaboration of scientific teams were able to get portions to study. One finding in particular shook them up.

One of the researchers working with Dr. Bierman noticed dark bits that didn't look like mineral grains. Under a microscope, they were seen to be plant matter. Gathering more was easy. Melt a few grams of permacrete, centrifuge, and wait. Little dark bits will float to the top. Botanists were able to identify some of the species represented. It proved that the land had once been ice free, not nearly as long ago as everyone thought. A lot more work finally demonstrated that the ice-free period ended a bit less than half a million years ago. Other measurements, such as isotope ratios from the water in the permacrete, showed that the average temperature during the ice-free time was similar to what it is today on the coast of Greenland at that latitude, but that atmospheric CO₂ was about 280 ppm; it is 420 ppm now. Camp Century is more than 100 miles inland of the present edge of the ice.

There are multitudes of other findings, but this is the smoking gun. The ice cap of Greenland is more fragile than we thought, and at least 2/3 of it melted away for some period before snow and ice accumulated again. If all of the ice in Greenland were to melt, that alone would add 24 feet, or about 7.5 m, to the depth of the ocean. Two-thirds of that would result in 16 feet, or 5 m.

The last chapter of the book describes some consequences of the sea rising by 5 m. The timeline is instructive, though. That sea level rise will take at least a couple of decades. A lot depends on politics and business, as the author acknowledges. Here's my take on that.

Nearly all of the leaders in Washington are at one extreme or the other. Genuine Democrats and Republicans rarely rise to national leadership. An often-misquoted Bible verse begins, "The love of money is a root of all evils…" (1 Tim 6:10). Note that it says "a root" not "the root." There are other roots. A close second root is the lust for power and control. Whether far Right or far Left, the Totalitarians of both political parties want to exert control. Over us. Mitigating the climate crisis is not in the interest of either of them. The situation itself, and exaggerating its direness, is their weapon against us. The more moderate national leaders are utterly swamped by the control-mongers. In the world, the top five carbon emitters are:

1. China, 34% of total, 9.24 Ton/y/person
2. USA, 12% of total, 13.8 Ton/y/person
3. India, 7.6% of total, 2.07 Ton/y/person
4. Russia, 5.3% of total, 14.5 Ton/y/person
5. Japan, 2.4% of total, 7.54 Ton/y/person

Those five add up to 61.3%. If China could "catch down" with Japan on a per person basis, its percentage would go from 34% to just under 28% of the current total, or 29.6% of a total amount that is 93.7% of today's total. That difference would be nearly half of total US emission. China is the elephant in the room.

I wanted to go into much more detail, but I decided this is not where that belongs. I would add only this: our only bridge to a future without fossil fuels, or nearly so, is nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion is too far in the future to be of any help. As it happens, I've recently learned that China is building experimental Thorium reactors, perhaps hoping to replace Uranium. Apparently Thorium "burning" produces less (or less dangerous?) radioactive waste. Similar research is starting up here also. I need to do more research, but it is a hopeful sign.

All these things have long lead times. Part of the problem is regulatory. With control freaks in charge of both sides of Congress, I am not sure they will be any help. I hate to end this review on a downer, but at present, I see a long tunnel ahead before any light might appear.

This book is required reading for everyone, particularly voters.

Re-visiting the Jabberwock

 kw: ai experiments, artificial intelligence, generated art, poems, illustrations, photo essays

A little more than two years ago I used Dall-E2 to illustrate the poem "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. Now that there are four high quality generative art sites that I use, I experimented with bringing just the Jabberwock itself up to date. In nearly all cases the programs relied on dragon imagery.

This is a wide-view redraw by Dall-E3 of one result of my second prompt. It's a little less sinister than the results of the first prompt. Here is how it went:

Dall-E3: "The Jabberwock"

All are fierce dragons in near-silhouette. All but one are shown against the Moon.

Dall-E3: "The Jabberwock as a pastel painting"

The word "pastel" has evoked a less sinister atmosphere. We find flowers and butterflies and in one case the dragon is actually smiling. Now that Dall-E3 can recast a square image into one with a wider aspect ratio I had it re-do the second image, on upper right. Note that the wide image at the top of the post has elements from all four images. By experimentation I found that, while re-formatting each image produces a different result, repeating the re-format step on a particular square image yields exactly the same wider image as the prior re-formatting on that image. The re-formatting offerings are square and 4:3, but the resulting wide format images are actually 1792x1024, with a ratio of 1.75:1 or 7:4. That's close enough to 16:9 (HD) that it takes just a little cropping to produce a 16:9 image (1792x1008), which can be put through Upscayl to make it big enough to use for an HD wallpaper.

I went on to try Gemini (formerly Bard), which now uses Imagen 3 to make images, and only one at a time. The 3-panel pasteup here is from three prompts:

• An image of the Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky
• An image of the Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting
• A full-body image of the Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting

Adding "pastel" definitely produces a less fierce result. The third item is the least dragonlike. Unfortunately for much of what I do, one cannot outpaint with Gemini, and asking for "wide format" or "HD ratio" gets ignored.. Maybe such options are available with Gemini Plus, but I haven't yet signed up for that.

I looked next to Leonardo AI, which is the most recent tool I've used. It has many options and variations. Here I'll present four sets of results. Leo produces images in a horizontal string. I rearranged these as 2x2 rectangular arrays. The original images are 1368x768 pixels, not quite a 16:9 ratio (though it's labeled as such in the menu), but 171:96.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting", Portrait, Cinematic

The "eye" in each image is a flag that indicates it is public. One needs a paid subscription to make private images. Though these are all dragonoid, some of them have no wings. This prompt without "pastel painting" produced much darker and fiercer results.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Concept Art, Stylistic Illustration

These were the most colorful results of all my experiments with Leo. The "Concept Art" setting pushes such limits. Though these have fierce expressions, they are rather cute.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Graphic Design, 3D

These are quite dark and sinister, but not as dark as some results.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting", Graphic Design, 3D

The addition of "pastel" has lightened things up a lot, both in visual and emotional tone. It's interesting to note that these critters all have multiple tails. I count lavender as the least threatening hue.

Finally, I turned to Playground, which was once the most flexible of the tools. Since they shut down Canvas mode in mid-September, it has been harder to use all the filters and other options. The free version is slow, and sometimes times out. Playground also presents a horizontal string of four images, which I rearranged as a 2x2 matrix. I set aspect ratio to 4:3 mode, which one would expect to yield 1.333:1 images; the actual images are 1216x832, about 1.46:1 or 19:13. For the two Playground mode where this was possible I used the Watercolor filter, considering it similar to saying "pastel painting". Playground has three image engines available.

Playground: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Stable Diffusion XL, Watercolor filter

The background architecture in items 1 and 4 adds interest. SDXL is now considered a "traditional" or even "retro" engine. I also had the option to set a "faithfulness to prompt" setting, and used 4 ("more free").

Playground: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Playground v2.5, Watercolor filter

As I've frequently observed, PG25 is edgier and typically a bit darker.

Playground: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Playground v3.0, no filter

Wow! What a difference from all the others. PG30 is apparently more attuned to "poem". It even tried to write one (second image), though the character strings are illegible. The third image looks like it could be a bookplate. PG30 is now the most colorful and creative engine Playground has to offer; it was introduced earlier this year.

I must say a word about limits and conditions in the free versions I use.

• Dall-E3 lets you run 15 prompts daily, and each prompt yields four images. There appears to be no charge for re-formatting an image.
• Gemini has no explicit limit, but when I asked, it told me that sending many image requests in rapid sequence could slow things down.
• Leonardo AI gives you 150 points to use in a day. However, that doesn't mean 150 images. There are about ten (the number occasionally varies) Presets. Two of them "charge" 10 points per prompt, and in the free version, you always get four images per prompt. One of them is 24 points (on a few occasions I saw it was 104 points). The rest are 14 points. So it is possible to generate fifteen 10-pointers, or ten 14-pointers plus one 10-pointer, or six 24-pointers (with 6 unusable points) per day. A "day" resets to the time you created your account, which is 8PM for me. You can outpaint and inpaint with Leonardo, for variable numbers of points per action.
• Playground originally let me generate 150 images daily, up to four at a time. More recently the limit has been 50, and at present I don't see an indication of how many images I have left in a session.

Paying for a subscription to Playground or Leonardo AI opens up greatly expanded limits, and added functionality. I haven't tried all the combinations of either of these programs, but one day I may pick one of them to subscribe to. I have lots else going on in my life, so I don't see much need to do so at the moment.

An interplanetary thriller

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, moon, mars, mysteries

The Oxygen Farmer by Colin Holmes is an upgrade from the Space Opera subgenre of science fiction. It is set in space, mostly on or near the Moon, and there is plenty of opera, of the dysfunctional-family kind. The novel is a thrilling mystery that I can't say much about without being a spoiler. I'll confine myself to some of the ideas that interested me. 

This image is the fruit of a long negotiation with LeonardoAI. It's intended to evoke generic "space opera".

The setting is in late 2077, plus about a year; things happen fast in scifi spacetime. The first time I saw children using cell phones (flip phones in the late 1990's) I remarked, "Give it another generation or so, and they'll install a phone in the bone behind the ear of everyone, that is biologically powered and voice activated." The year 2077 is closer to two generations future, and everyone wears a "wristy", a souped up smart watch. It is used for "everything", the way smart phones/watches are used today in China and much of Europe…the US has some catching up to do. If you ask Ray Kurzweil, he would say that such a device will be long out of date by 2077.

There's an interesting dichotomy of thought. The protagonist/hero, Mil, (he really does some heroic stuff) was born 1/1/2000, so he's pushing eighty. Living and working on the Moon for half his life already, he thinks of himself as superannuated, too old to know better than to keep working. Yet the norm on Earth is to live to around the age of 140, and while it isn't stated, there's the implication that retirement before age 100 is unusual.

Chemical rockets are still used, but seem to be more efficient, shortening trips between Earth and Moon, and soon enough, Mars. Someone remarks that visiting the Moon is getting too much like visiting Cleveland; considering it's roughly a full day of travel, that would be starting from Melbourne, perhaps.

The super-rich guy behind a lot of what goes on is named Amon Neff. He's apparently the first trillionaire; the author trusts us to recognize that monetary amounts can be thought of in 2024 terms, even though inflation in the coming 53 years is likely to make today's trillion into 5-10 trillion (or much more) in the currency of 2077. I found it interesting that Neff's age in 2077 places his birth year near that of a modern near-trillionaire with two 4-letter names. But "our" super-rich guy isn't much like what Neff turns out to be.

Space and radiation medicine has apparently advanced a lot. Mil, even after a long lifetime of more-than-ordinary radiation exposure, survives an event that doses him with 4 Grays. A Gray is a unit of acute radiation absorbed, and for reference, 5 Grays leads to death within two weeks about half the time…for an initially healthy person. When a fella already has one foot and three toes in the grave, it takes a lot to keep his ticker ticking.

I like the concept of oxygen farming. The infrastructure needed to make practical use of such a resource is well thought out. The electrochemistry, and solar energy harvesting to run it all, are presented sketchily at best, which makes sense because they aren't on the plotline, but are stagecraft.

The author surrounds his characters with lots of equipment in various stages of wearing out, usually for dramatic effect. Set aside the Moon as the environment, and it is a lot like the life of  ranchers I know, who excel at keeping old trucks and tractors working decades past the expiration of their warranties.

The book's a fun read.