Science you should know about: Homosexual necrophiliac duck rape

Moeliker (2002:fig. 2b): Wakka-cheeka-wakka-cheeka

Those funny guys at Zooillogix just covered the seal-brutalizes-penguin story that's been all over the news lately, which prompted me to post about my favorite scientific paper of all time:

Moeliker, C.W. 2001. The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae). DEINSEA 8: 243-247.

Here's the entire text of the abstract:
"On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass facade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an "Attempted Rape Flight" that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."

What the author doesn't mention in the abstract is that the 75-minute event ended prematurely when he separated the drake from the object of its perverted affection. Which makes me want to hit him (the author, not the drake). Because, why? Why would he end it? One minute was enough to document the behavior. After 75 minutes, surely any self-respecting scientist would want to know just how long this was going to continue, and watch until it was over. Now we'll never know. What a loss for science.

So if you see an animal doing something perverted--and they are, all the time, the unreconstructed little bastards--cowboy up and record the dad-blamed data. ALL OF IT.

Sheesh!

Myrmecophilia

I've always liked ants.

When we were kids my cousin and brother (two different people) and I would put ants in jars and watch them dig tunnels and stuff. A fair number of caterpillars and grasshoppers went into the jars as well, to be torn apart in grisly episodes of Predator Theater. We lost our taste for it when we put a toad in. First his ass got covered in ants. Then he covered himself and them with copious amounts of poison snot exuded from his skin. We pulled him out, washed him off, and set him free.

Reading that now, I suppose it sounds pretty awful. But what you gotta realize is, we realized at the time that there was a line and we had crossed it. If we'd been caught and spanked, it would have been just one more in a long line of forgettable Times We Got In Trouble. But we had the freedom to escalate things until we made ourselves sick, and I will never forget that. It unsettles me to this day.

And hey, the toad was none the worse for the wear.

A few years later E.O. Wilson's monster book, The Ants, came out, and it was celebrated with a big National Geographic article with lots of detailed full-color paintings of ants taking care of business. I must have read that article about a zillion times. I had ant-mania for a while, but it didn't last.

Ants have popped up in my life from time to time since then. Most recently last month when I got to spend a day chasing ants with Bill Clark in Big Bend. I picked up a random, fist-sized chunk of granite halfway along a transect. I held it close to my face to get a good look at the crystals and the weathering patterns. Then I flipped it over to see what the bottom side looked like.

The other side of the rock was completely covered with an undulating swarm of tiny red fire ants. None of my fingers were more than a centimeter from the ants. I have no idea how they could have been so riled up and not come around the side of the rock and eaten my freakin' hand off, but they didn't.

Imagine picking up a hamburger, flipping it over to look at the bun, and finding it totally covered with a living carpet of ants. I was caught equally off guard. The rock went up in the air, I jumped back about ten feet and started doing a modified form of the spider dance. Eeeeeeeeee-yargh!! [shudder]

Then I discovered this post on litter ants by Mike Kaspari, an ecologist at my old alma mater. Litter ants are cool, man. They are tiny. Their colonies are tiny.

Litter ants live on the forest floor in small hollow twigs, empty acorns, or even between leaves. The whole colony may consist of only 100 or so ants, just enough to cover the tip of your pinky. This small size allows litter ants to be incredibly abundant: in a tropical rainforest there may be 5-10 species living together in a meter square plot.

How cool is that!? A whole colony in an acorn. These things are to the rest of the ant kingdom what my aquarium is to the Amazon.

How much would it suck to pick up that acorn and put it in your pocket?

Anyway, litter ants are also cool for another reason.

And then the “aha!” moment.

I saw this Pheidole colony as carrying within it a little tally sheet as to how much it had allocated to growth and colony maintenance (the number of workers), how much it had allocated to defense (the majors), and how much it had allocated to reproduction (the winged males and queens). Furthermore, if I looked very carefully, I could see the ants carrying pupae of workers, majors, and reproductives: a record of where the colony wanted to go in the future! The mind raced. I was surrounded by thousands of litter ant colonies, hundreds of species (of which, scads were Pheidole) all waiting to be harvested and tallied toward understanding a big question in EEB: “by what rules do individuals invest their limited time and resources into different activities–all of them critical to the colony’s fitness?"

Van Valen, eat yer heart out.

I gotta say, it's being able to answer exactly those kinds of questions that occasionally makes me wish I worked on something a little smaller and more, um, alive than sauropods.

Oh, who am I kidding? Sauropods rock too hard, even if I will die with a lot of unanswered questions.



I suppose everyone does.



And then?



Your mortal remains get decomposed.





By freakin' ants!

Old Navy Helo Pilot Strikes Back

Kent Lidke used to fly helicopters for the Navy in Antarctica, and he writes about it very well. This is one of the best things I've ever read. Even though he's writing about something very different from what I do, it's still a dream job, and it reminds me of how lucky I am to get to be a paleontologist.

This was originally an e-mail post in an online discussion about the future of space exploration. The previous poster had written something about real space travel being much less exciting than Star Wars and Star Trek. This was Kent's reply. Many thanks to him for giving me permission to post it.

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In all seriousness, this is true. Because of the flight times involved, flying between planets is not going to be exciting in our lifetimes. However, once you get there, the stuff you do CAN be exciting.

Like J-Rod and no doubt a lot of others, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, fly around the moon and all that. Even in college, I was studying aeronautical engineering and propulsion systems, and checking out payload integration companies like Orbital Sciences. I graduated 5 months after the Challenger explosion and space was drying up, so I joined the Navy thinking I could go the test pilot route, and maybe things would be hot again by the time I got through that. Then I ended up in helicopters, which turned out to be a good thing, and then I got insanely lucky and got a slot with the Antarctic program.

I can tell you what it's going to be like 25 or 50 or a hundred years down the road when they're exploring the moon and Mars, because that's what Antarctica was like. It was exactly like what everyone wants space exploration to be like. No giant mission control room, no eight years of training and waiting for your ride. You go down to the hangar in the morning, get your list of science missions, preflight your ship, and off you go.

You spend the day landing your ship in places no human being has ever been, you see things too big to capture in a picture, you wear lots of cool gear and a helmet with a visor, you get to camp out on an alien surface every once in a while. The scientists tell you about what they're doing, and what it means, and why they love it. You visit other stations, trade patches, try their food, and drink their wine. You climb mountains in 80 knot winds and get so cold you can't talk so you have to use hand signals, you get scared shitless by warning lights, wind shears and low fuel warnings. You break down and have to lash your busted ship together with duct tape and bailing wire, and nurse it back to the base.

You don't get TV or phone calls, you make do with an occasional HF radio patch, if the solar activity isn't frying the ionosphere, and sometimes you can pick up a relay of the super bowl on the navigation radio. You wait for the next supply run from home with fresh vegetables and mail, and you have big parties for everyone at the station for Halloween, Christmas and New Years. Anyone who can play an instrument gets together for a concert and barbecue in the spring.

You work hard and you play hard, because every day really can be your last. Risk really is your business, and it's cool and exciting and scary and 100% totally kickass. You have never been so alive before and you never will be again, and you know it. When you leave for the last time, it breaks your heart, and you spend the next ten years wishing things could have stayed that way forever.

That's what it's supposed be like, and that's what it IS like, once you get there. It'll be that way on the moon, it'll be that way on Mars. It'll be full environment suits instead of cold weather gear, it'll be lumbering interplanetary transports instead of C-130s, and I don't know what they'll use for Hueys but there'll be something. There will be pilots and mechanics and cargo handlers and radio operators, scientists and lab techs and administrators, and survival specialists and firemen and kitchen workers and construction workers and shuttle bus drivers.

Ordinary people who aren't rocket scientists will live and work there because they got an itch to do something extraordinary. Every once in a while they'll get a chance to take a ride out of town and see something, and they'll show up at the hanger all wound up like little kids, and they'll take their cameras and video recorders and get on the ship and for a few hours they'll get to see and do things most of the human race only dreams about, and they will live lifetimes in those hours, and they will treasure every single minute of it.

I got incredibly lucky. I stumbled into a real life frontier right here on Earth, an exploration program that was all about the science and the learning and the knowing, and it turned out to be everything I was looking for in a place I never would have thought of. National Science Foundation, civilians, Navy, Army, American, Kiwi, Aussie and every other kind... It was real life Star Trek, all people working together for the benefit of all mankind.

So go ahead and say it's not real. For most of the world it never will be. But for those with the dream, and the drive and the luck, it's going to happen. I've seen it, and it fucking rocks.

Warning: Old Navy Helo Pilot story ahead...

Tragically, it's not mine. One of Jarrod's animator homies, Kent Lidke, used to fly helicopters for the Navy. In Antarctica. It is one of those jobs that is actually even more badass than it sounds, as Kent's stories attest. This one's a gem. Many thanks to Kent for letting me post it. I'll pester him for more.

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Warning: Old Navy Helo Pilot story ahead...

Back in the day, we flew some GPS surveyor guys from the New Zealand Geological Survey up to some unknown peak down on the ice. 60 kt winds, gusting to 80, the friggin' helo wanted to lift off at idle. They needed something like 45 minutes to an hour to get the precision they were looking for, so we shut down, and they climbed up the last 50 or a hundred yards to the top of the peak to set up their gear. After about an hour and 15 minutes, I finally decided I better go see what was up, so I pulled on my Korean War surplus Arctic parka over all the stuff I was already wearing, goggled up and climbed out. The wind would've just about blown me off the mountain, so I more or less crawled up to where they were. By the time I got there, my face was so frozen I couldn't talk clearly, so I had to gesture at my wrist and shrug in order to say "How much longer?" They said they needed about 15 more minutes, so I crawled back down to about 50 feet from the bird and curled up in the lee side of a rock to smoke a cigarette, more for the challenge and to kill time than anything else. The zippo lighter, contrary to claims, will not light in all circumstances, but the survival matches did the trick, and I sat on the side of a mountain in Antarctica no one had ever walked on before, smoking a cigarette in an 80 knot wind.

Anyway, after a while the guys crawled down from the peak and we all climbed into the helo. According the airspeed indicator, winds were still 60 to 80 kts. The book says the wind limits for starting up are 45 kts. Fortunately, in a completely unrelated chapter, the book also says the airspeed indicator is unreliable below 70 knots, so we decided it was fair to say that we didn't KNOW the winds were over 45, and hit the starter. Well, the damn thing was so cold soaked that the first engine wouldn't start, but the starter motor already had the rotors turning a little and if we didn't spin them up quick the wind would probably flap them right into the tailboom, so we flipped the starter over to the other engine hoping the battery wasn't dead yet. That engine lit, but hung up and didn't make it all the way to idle speed because half the fuel manifold was frozen shut. I opened the throttle wider, hoping if I let it run for a couple minutes the fuel lines would thaw out, and that when they did the sudden fuel surge wouldn't blow the engine up. Sure enough, after a couple a minutes there was a whump of compressor stall and a whine as the engine tried to overspeed, but we caught it with the throttle. After that getting the second engine started was easy, and all we had to do was manage to take off in a blizzicane.

We lifted off with the stick shoved almost all the way forward and still ended up backing out of the lz, and once we had a little room pulled the stick back to center. It was like popping a big parachute, 0 to 80 in no seconds with a right roll to get turned around in the direction we were going and diving down the mountain like Franz Klammer to try to pick up some airspeed to go with our ground speed. It seemed totally insane but it worked like a charm.

I would do that every day of the week and twice on Sunday if I could. That was a great f'ing day.

I would sincerely like to thank you all for paying me to do stuff like that.

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See ya. I'm off to be a helicopter pilot in Antartica. *Sigh*

In lieu of going to fly a helicopter myself, I will seriously bug Kent to let me put up his awesome post on how flying a helicopter in Antarctica is like being a real-life space explorer. It's possibly the most badass thing I've ever read. Stay tuned, true believers.